“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.”

“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde”

“Life was long, unless you died, and he didn’t intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two.”

“I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!”

“I don't want you to wake up at sixty-five and realize, 'I spend forty of my best years doing something that just funded my life.”