Quotes About Aging

Después de secarse mira su rostro en el espejo con la cautela de quien busca averiguar cuánto ha progresado la vejez desde la última mirada.

Entré en mi casa, vi que amancillada de anciana habitación era despojos; mi báculo, más corvo y menos fuerte. Vencida de la edad sentí mi espada, y no hallé cosa en que poner los ojos que no fuese recuerdo de la muerte.

When you hear her say, 'What else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these?' You look right at the sky, Clear through the bullet holes she has for eyes. And you look on the cracks that begin around her eyes spread beyond her skin And the hills crack. And the temples crack. And the sky falls with a plateglass clatter around the shatter proof crone who stands alone. And you are reduced to so much small change in her hand.

This clear and luminous nature of mind is as changeless as space. It is not afflicted by desire and so on, the adventitious stains, which are sprung from incorrect thoughts. It is not brought into existence by the water of karma, of the poisons, and so on. Hence it is also not consumed by the cruel fires of dying, falling sick, and aging.

The idea is to die young as late as possible.

The goal in life is to die young, as late as possible

In our society the elderly are regarded as biodegradable and superfluous, instead of what they really represent: a biological elite who, with weathered wisom, have much to offer the world.

The sooner growing older is stripped of reflexive dread, the better equipped we are to benefit from the countless ways in which it can enrich us.

My first interview was with eighty-eight-year-old folk artist Marcia Muth… 'Your life does change as you get older,' she told me. 'You get into what's important and what's not'.

We don't ask when people age out of singing, or eating ice cream; why would we stop making love?

Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural.

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

Two things make smoking a virtuous habit. In the first place, the smoker, by paying billions of pounds in tobacco duty, pretty well pays for the entire hospital service. In the second place, by dying on average five years younger that the non-smoker, the smoker reduces the burden of old age on society as a whole.

I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could oscillate between being biologically 20 and biologically 25 indefinitely.

Físicamente, vivimos más tiempo que en el pasado, pero la percepción del tiempo es mucho más rápida. Los meses corren, los años vuelan. Algunos están en la cumbre de su juventud psíquica, pero se miran y descubren que tienen setenta u ochenta años.

Físicamente, vivimos más tiempo que en el pasado, pero la percepción del tiempo es mucho más rápida. Los eses corren, los años vuelan. Algunos están en la cumbre de su juventud psíquica, pero se miran y descubren que tienen setenta u ochenta años.

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat are really good friends.

keep telling her how beautiful she looks. Keep on saying that. How beautiful she looks. Lay it on thick. She won't believe you, she's too smart to fall for blarney, but it's what she wants to hear. It's the tribute you must always pay to great beauties when they grow old. Remember it's always the cameraman who grows old, never the star.

The aging and decreasing population is a serious problem in many developed countries today. In Japan's case, these demographic changes are taking place at a more rapid pace than any other country has ever experienced.

Just because someone looks old doesn't mean he or she is. The skin of some people who spend a lot of time outdoors seems to age very rapidly. Someone can look 80 or 90 and only be 40 to 50.

When I get done playing basketball, I'm definitely not going to be a rapper. I'm not going to be an old person who is focused on being a rapper.