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ELDER QUOTES

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You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older.
-- Anouk Aimee

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel

* Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
-- James A. Baldwin

We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.
-- May L. Becker

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
-- Les Brown

To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
-- Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

* Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
-- Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.
-- Lillian Carter

* I am an old man, but in many senses a very young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life.
-- Pablo Casals

* Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.
-- Deepak Chopra

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

We've put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.
-- Frank A. Clark

* I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
-- Albert Einstein

* I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

* As we grow old…the beauty steals inward.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.
-- Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 1980

* Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
-- Benjamin Franklin

* Aging is not "lost youth" but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
-- Betty Friedan

"Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant with the weak and the wrong. Sometime in your life you will have been all of these."
-- Dr. Robert H. Goddard (American rocket engineer 1882-1945)

* It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
-- Hubert Humphrey

* "I can think of no better way of redeeming this tragic world today than love and laughter. Too many of the young have forgotten how to laugh, and too many of the elders have forgotten how to love. Would not our lives be lightened if only we could all learn to laugh more easily at ourselves and to love one another."
-- Theodore Hesburgh

 

A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.
-- Dorothea Kent

* Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.
-- Maggie Kuhn

There must be a goal at every stage of life! There must be a goal!
-- Maggie Kuhn

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.
-- Maggie Kuhn

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
-- Doris Lessing

"There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age."
-- Sophia Loren

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
-- Douglas MacArthur

Age is…wisdom, if one has lived one's life properly.
-- Miriam Makeba

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
-- W. Somerset Maugham

* If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
-- Margaret Mead

* "The young, free to act on their initiative, can lead their elders in the direction of the unknown... The children, the young, must ask the questions that we would never think to ask, but enough trust must be re-established so that the elders will be permitted to work with them on the answers."
-- Margaret Mead

Don't just count your years, make your years count.
-- Ernest Meyers

We are not limited by our old ages; we are liberated by it.
-- Stu Mittleman

Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.
--Arthur E. Morgan

I never feel age...If you have creative work, you don't have age or time.
-- Louise Nevelson (1900 - 1988)

The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!
-- Eugene O'Neill

One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.
-- Harry A. Overstreet

Live your life and forget your age.
-- Norman Vincent Peale

Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.
-- Ralph B. Perry

He who is of calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.
-- Plato (427 BC - 347 BC)

 

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.
-- Jean Paul Richter

I want to awaken the passion and creativity of youth, combine it with the wisdom, experience and insight of elders, and transform our world."
~ Ocean Robbins

* "To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future."
-- Bertrand Russell

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.
-- George Sand (1804 - 1876)

"Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations"
-- George Santayana (Spanish born American Philosopher, Poet and Humanist )

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
-- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

"Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

* With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

 

No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
-- Terence

* None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm
-- Henry David Thoreau

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.
-- Samuel Ullman

* The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright

 

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Senior Citizens Day - August 21

Intl. Day of Older Persons - October 1

 
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