“No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”
Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms
Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
“Men grow old, but they do not ripen.”
Les hommes vieillissent, mais ne mûrissent pas.
Source: Notes sur la vie (published posthumously 1899), P. 103; translation p. 380.
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Alphonse Daudet15
French novelist 1840–1897Related quotes
“For in misery men grow old quickly.”
Hesiod book Works and Days
Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 93.
“We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
This is an anonymous modern quip which is a variant of a statement by G. Stanley Hall, in Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904):
: Men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely.
Misattributed
Benjamin Jowett (1817–1893) Theologian, classical scholar, and academic administrator
Source: Letters, p. 250
“People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.”
Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet
"Old Men"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Context: People expect old men to die,
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when...
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
“Let's grow old and die together. Let's do it now.”
Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist
The Waiting Song
Song lyrics
“Old men must die, or the world would grow mouldy, would only breed the past again.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate
Becket, Prologue, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet
Optimism
Poetry quotes, Poems of Pleasure (1900)
Context: I find a rapture linked with each despair,
Well worth the price of anguish. I detect
More good than evil in humanity.
Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes,
And men grow better as the world grows old.