“Excavations at Ai Khanoum on the northern border of modern Afghanistan have produced great quantities of Greek inscriptions and even the remnants of a philosophical treatise originally on papyrus. One of the most interesting is the base of a dedication by one Klearchos, perhaps the known student of Aristotle, that records his bringing to this new Greek city, Alexandria on the Oxus, the traditional maxims from the shrine of Apollo at Delphi concerning the five ages of man:In childhood, seemlinessIn youth, self-controlIn middle age, justiceIn old age, wise councilIn death, painlessness”

“the brain's business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view - one we can act on”

“There’s no two ways about it, Tolkien fans are a funny bunch. I should know, for I was one of them. Been there, done that, read the book, gone mad. I first took on The Lord of the Rings at the age of eleven or twelve; to be precise, I began it at the age of eleven and finished at the age of twelve. It was, and remains, not a book that you happen to read, like any other, but a book that happens to you: a chunk bitten out of your life.”

“Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle aged people but not many wise ones.”

“It was like when a midde-aged woman, happily married, found out that her favorite movie star was gay. It broke her heart just a litte to know that there wasn't even a chance in fantasyland for the two of them to ever touch.”

“We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of thier old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.”

“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”