“Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kind, sunshiny old age.”
1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/66/12266.html, vol. 1, letter 37
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Lydia Maria Child 34
American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist 1802–1880Related quotes
“He loved his kind, but sought the love of few,
And valued old opinions more than new.”
Infatuation.
“To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.”
On the Seventieth Birthday of Julia Ward Howe (May 27, 1899); reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.”
Almost certainly attributable to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who is, in various sources, credited with having said this in letters to Harriet Beecher Stowe (who turned 70 in 1881) and Julia Ward Howe (who turned 70 in 1889), as well as having made the commented about himself. Holmes, Sr. reached the age of 70 in 1879, while Holmes, Jr. reached that age in 1911, some time after the earliest reports of this quote.
Misattributed
The Unseen Assassins https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216538/page/n49 (1932), p. 48; in later variants, "pity" was misquoted as "piety" in the Naval War College Review, Vol. 10 (1957), p. 27, and some internet citations have compressed "has become, for the European of our age" to read "has become for our age".
A passage from the first volume of his Memoirs as quoted in Political Realism in American Thought (1977) by John W. Coffey, p. 26
Context: I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places — qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror — for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality."