82 Age Quotes To Inspire

In a world where time often feels fleeting, the wisdom encapsulated within age has the power to inspire and enlighten. Whether you're seeking motivation, solace, or simply a new perspective on growing older, our curated collection of the top 82 age quotes promises to resonate with every stage of life. Each quote distills years of experience, offering timeless insights that inspire and provoke thought. Join us as we explore these gems of wisdom that celebrate the journey through life and the beauty of age.

1. “When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.” - George Burns

2. “One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.” - Oscar Wilde

3. “At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” - Salvador Dali

4. “The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia. Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.” - Katherine Dunn

5. “In my dreams, I never have an age.” - Madeleine L'Engle

6. “No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.” - C.S. Lewis

7. “Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.” - Oscar Wilde

8. “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” - George Orwell

9. “It was a bitter moment for us. We weren't two mature parents. We were just two kids playing grown-up. We still needed Mommy and Daddy's permission, blessings, and money to survive.” - Erma Bombeck

10. “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.” - Martin Luther

11. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” - T.S. Eliot

12. “When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, 'It's not the days that are old, it's you that's old.' I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.” - Karl Lagerfeld

13. “For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

14. “At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.” - Mark Haddon

15. “…. by the time they have reached the middle of their life’s journey, few people remember how they have managed to arrive at themselves, at their amusements, their point of view, their wife, character, occupation and successes, but they cannot help feeling that not much is likely to change anymore. It might even be asserted that they have been cheated, for one can nowhere discover any sufficient reason for everything’s coming about as it has. It might just have well as turned out differently. The events of people’s lives have, after all, only to the last degree originated in them, having generally depended on all sorts of circumstances such as the moods, the life or death of quite different people, and have, as it were, only at the given point of time come hurrying towards them” - Robert Musil

16. “It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.” - Virginia Woolf

17. “I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again---I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter...” - Clive Barker

18. “I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” - Charlotte Brontë

19. “The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.” - Michael Chabon

20. “I'm gonna enjoy being old I think I'll be awesome at it.” - Craig Ferguson

21. “I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.” - Charlotte Brontë

22. “Childhood isn't just those years. It's also the opinions you form about them afterward. That's why our childhoods are so long.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

23. “A man that is young in years may be old in hours if he have lost no time. ” - Francis Bacon

24. “In youth,' he said, speaking as if from a great distance, 'we believe, and the death of belief forces us to disavow all belief. But that disavowal, time softens, and if we do not believe, we hope. Belief is easier to kill, somehow, and its death easier to bear.” - Michelle West

25. “People talk to old people like they're children.'Oh you're very old aren't you?' Yeah I'm old. I'm not stupid.” - Craig Ferguson

26. “Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

27. “Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.” - David Gemmell

28. “I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.” - Sherman Alexie

29. “You're very old, aren't you?""Just as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.” - Philippa Pearce

30. “Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.” - C.S. Lewis

31. “The best thing about being 40 is that you can appreciate 25-year-old men more.” - Colleen McCullough

32. “At thirty a man suspects himself a fool;Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;At fifty chides his infamous delay,Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;In all the magnanimity of thoughtResolves; and re-resolves; then dies the same.” - Edward Young

33. “What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew” - Robert Browning

34. “Twenty-seven.”His brow puckered, and he blinked over at her. “Twenty-seven hundred years, right?”If he were speaking to Taliyah, yes. “No. Just twenty-seven plain, ordinary years.”“You don’t mean human years, do you?”“No. I mean dog years,” she said dryly, then pressed her lips together. Where was the filter that was usually poised over her mouth? Strider didn’t seem to mind, though. Rather, he seemed stupefied. Would Sabin have had the same reaction were he awake? “What’s so hard to believe about my age?” As the question echoed between them, a thought occurred to her and she blanched. “Do I look ancient?”“No, no. Of course not. But you’re immortal. Powerful.” - Gena Showalter

35. “I wondered if that's what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody every got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn't have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die.” - Portia De Rossi

36. “I am older than your age and younger than your body.” - Santosh Kalwar

37. “Of all the Hathaway sisters,” Cam said equably, “Beatrix is the one most suited to choose her own husband. I trust her judgment.”Beatrix gave him a brilliant smile. “Thank you, Cam.”“What are you thinking?” Leo demanded of his brother-in-law. “You can’t trust Beatrix’s judgment.”“Why not?”“She’s too young,” Leo said.“I’m twenty-three,” Beatrix protested. “In dog years I’d be dead.” - Lisa Kleypas

38. “By the time you're thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.” - Chuck Palahniuk

39. “I was tired of seeing the Graces always depicted as beautiful young things. I think wisdom comes with age and life and pain. And knowing what matters.” - Louise Penny

40. “when you live forever and don't age, it gives you time to hope” - Laurell K. Hamilton

41. “Dad, will they ever come back?""No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica. "No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road.""Oh, no," said Will."Oh, yes, said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun."They moved around the carousel slowly."What will they look like? How will we know them?""Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here."Both boys looked around swiftly.But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves.Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad.Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole.Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will.Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders.The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night.Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey.Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy.Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord.Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes.How easy, thought Will.Just this once, thought Jim.But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally...The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment....finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks...proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows....Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.” - Ray Bradbury

42. “You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.” - Lillian Gish

43. “The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.” - George MacDonald

44. “Young age can be experience just once, but immaturity never leaves even we grown up??” - bheng927

45. “Since few people arrive at retirement with an understanding that this transition will involve a rethinking of who they are, an interim pattern has emerged, in which travel offers a way of fulfilling deferred daydreams of adventure while the next stage takes shape. [p. 31]” - MARY CATHERINE BATESON

46. “... active wisdom--an entire cohort with something new to offer to the world as years of experience combined with continuing health. [p. 52]” - MARY CATHERINE BATESON

47. “You read any Greek myths, puppy? The one about the gorgon Medusa, particularly? I used to wonder what could be so terrible that you couldn't survive even looking at it.Until I got a little older and I figured out the obvious answer.Everything.” - Mike Carey & Peter Gross

48. “The young should not think of themselves as immature and the elderly need not view themselves as feeble. Our minds control our bodies. Have no age, transcend both past and future, and enter into naka-ima—the “eternal present.” - H.E. Davey

49. “People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.” - Megan Chance

50. “But I was awake, sitting by the window looking down at the trailer and Mr. Zoltan's truck. I could not sleep. That is how it is with folks my age. We take naps during the day, and then we cannot sleep at night. I think that it is because God is getting us ready for the grave. Is that right? Did He ever tell you? ("The Little Stranger")” - Gene Wolfe

51. “If you're not getting happier as you get older, then you're fuckin' up” - Ani DiFranco

52. “Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?” - Julian Barnes

53. “But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.” - Oscar Wilde

54. “Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.” - Ramona Ausubel

55. “In this day and age, there is a special mandate for every one of us to be in-charge of our lives by sitting at the driver's seat of our lives. Rule your world!” - Ifeanyi C.O. Obiakor

56. “She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.” - Barbara Kingsolver

57. “George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.” - Elisabeth Elliot

58. “(On having being just proposed to)'Have you been thinking of this for long?' she managed jerkily, praying for the shock to recede so that she could behave a little more normally.'Let's say it crept up on me,' he suggested lightly.That didn't sound very romantic. Muggers crept up on you; so did old age.” - Lynne Graham

59. “doubt is the privilege of those who have lived a long time,” - José Saramago

60. “I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet.” - Francine Pascal

61. “Someday when you're twenty, maybe, I'll see you again. You'll be this hot soccer star at some great school, with a million guys more interesting than I am chasing you down. And you know what? I'll see you and I'll pray you want me still.” - Ann Brashares

62. “... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.” - David Mitchell

63. “At twenty-four she imagined with dread that she was growing old.” - Jean Rhys

64. “...all she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got used to the idea.” - Emma Straub

65. “When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better--her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties” - Virginia Woolf

66. “It’s really difficult to talk about dead people, but it’s even harder to talk about dead young women. It’s because from the time they die, they’ll be young forever. On the other hand, for us, the survivors, every year, every month, every day, we get older.Sometimes, I feel like I can feel myself aging from one hour to the next. It’s a terrible thing, but that’s reality.” - Haruki Murakami

67. “Do you remember what I forgot?” - Erica Goros

68. “He had an answer to almost everything and he retired at an early age.” - Dejan Stojanovic

69. “What shall I do to be for ever known,And make the age to come my own?” - Abraham Cowley

70. “It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the color fades, and the field is likely to narrow to an individual animal. Here one may observe his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness becomes permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.” - John Steinbeck

71. “His parents called him Youngster. They did this in the subconcious hope that he might take the hint. Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of 47.” - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

72. “It doesn't matter if you're 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100. Embrace your sexy-ass self and express it!” - Steve Maraboli

73. “You are mortal. You age, you die. If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?” - Cassandra Clare

74. “She has built her whole life on the foundation of beauty: each chiseled plane, each sloping dimple, each soft curve as crucial as keystones in the cathedral of her body.” - Nenia Campbell

75. “Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.” - Plato

76. “...You won't age? I promise you this - your hands will go shiny and transparent and at the slightest bruise they'll bleed...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain

77. “I suppose that one’s years spent living do not reflect a measure of our souls or strength of character.” - Peter Koevari

78. “I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery!]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.” - Galileo Galilei

79. “Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday's T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early -- it's summer vacation, after all -- and Tyler can't seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It's as if there's some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.” - Stephen King

80. “So now we are young still but a better sort of young.” - Penelope Lively

81. “If we are to use the words ‘childish’ and ‘infantile’ as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire?” - C.S. Lewis

82. “I realize thirty is just a number, that you're only as old as you feel and all that. I also realize that in the grand scheme of things, thirty is still young. But it's not that young.” - Emily Giffin