“I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”
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.
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts.”
“I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.”
“I am 54 and age is slowly writing itself on my face.”
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.”
“To be told that one can be dependent on one's parents until age 26 should strike a young person who wants to grow up as demeaning, not as something to celebrate.”
“One problem with age is that patience begins to ebb.”
“Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.”
“Older fatherhood isn't all bad: testosterone rates drop about 1% per year as men age, making them less reactive and more patient, and a professionally established middle-aged man is likely to have more time and money to devote to his kids than a twenty-something who's just getting started.”
“I can't get my knickers in a twist about my age and ageing in an industry that caters to the ids of 14-year-olds.”
“The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else.”
“I'd date someone younger or older age doesn't matter to me. Or looks, really - it's all about maturity.”
“I was very successful from a very early age, and I want to keep it.”
“In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”
“People dance at any age.”
“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”
“As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost.”