“Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.”
Growing older changes how we see everything — time, love, ambition, regret. These quotes capture the full arc of aging, from the stubborn optimism of youth to the hard-earned clarity that only comes with years behind you. Whether you are twenty and curious or eighty and reflective, there is something here that will land.
“Old age: I fall asleep during the funerals of my friends.”
“Ours is an excessively conscious age. We know so much, we feel so little.”
“You can have a spiritual awakening and discover a new side of you at any age. And best of all, love can happen at any age. Life can just start to get exciting when you're in your 40s and 50s. You have to believe that.”
“Young man, the secret of my success is that an early age I discovered that I was not God.”
“Age considers youth ventures.”
“The kids are old enough now - I just want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much. They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.”
“Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.”
“I didn't have any success in show business until I was 30 to 31 years of age.”
“Well, once you've resigned yourself to the fact that you are the more mature pop performer and you're past the age you ever thought you would do it, you might as well do it as long as you can. As long as I can still lift a microphone, then I'll do it, you know.”
“It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.”
“To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.”
“But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”
“Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.”
“I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.”
“Old age: the crown of life, our play's last act.”
“Old age is no place for sissies.”