Quotes about age
page 10

John Stuart Mill photo
Aldo Palazzeschi photo
John Hirst photo
Starhawk photo
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux photo

“In spite of every sage whom Greece can show,
Unerring wisdom never dwelt below;
Folly in all of every age we see,
The only difference lies in the degree.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

N'en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce,
En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse :
Tous les hommes sont fous, et, malgré tous leurs soins,
Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
Satire 4, l. 37
Satires (1716)

Irshad Manji photo
Charles Lyell photo
George Santayana photo
Brion Gysin photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Fali Sam Nariman photo
Fred Astaire photo
Edmund White photo
George S. Patton IV photo
David Foster Wallace photo
George William Russell photo

“I saw how all the trembling ages past,
Moulded to her by deep and deeper breath,
Neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last
And knows herself in death.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Russell L. Ackoff photo
Marino Marini photo
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux photo

“But satire, ever moral, ever new,
Delights the reader and instructs him, too.
She, if good sense refine her sterling page,
Oft shakes some rooted folly of the age.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

La satire, en leçons, en nouveautés fertile,
Sait seule assaisonner le plaisant et l'utile,
Et, d'un vers qu'elle épure aux rayons du bons sens,
Détromper les esprits des erreurs de leur temps.
Satire 9
Satires (1716)

Christian Doppler photo

“There have been applied sciences throughout the ages. … However this so-called practice was not much more than paper in nearly all of these cases, and the various applied sciences were only lacking a bagatelle, namely proper scientific practice. The applied sciences show the application of theoretic doctrines in existing events; but that is precisely what it does, it merely shows. Whereas the scientific practice autonomously puts to use these theories.”

Christian Doppler (1803–1853) mathematician, physicist

in his review of Joseph Beskiba's textbook, published in the Österreichische Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (September 7, 1844), as quoted by [Peter Schuster, Moving the stars: Christian Doppler, his life, his works and principle, and the world after, Living edition, 2005, 3901585052, 78]

Philip Roth photo

“You rebel against the tribal and look for the individual, for your own voice as against the stereotypical voice of the tribe or the tribe's stereotype of itself. You have to establish yourself against your predecessor, and doing so can well involve what they like to call self-hatred. I happen to think that—all those protestations notwithstanding—your self hatred was real and a positive force in its very destructiveness. Since to build something new often requires that something else be destroyed, self-hatred is valuable for a young person. What should he or she have instead—self-approval, self-satisfaction, self-praise? It's not so bad to hate the norms that keep a society from moving on, especially when the norms are dictated by fear as much as by anything else and especially when that fear is of the enemy forces of the overwhelming majority. But you seem now to be so strongly motivated by a need for reconciliation with the tribe that you aren't even willing to acknowledge how disapproving of its platitudinous demands you were back then, however ineluctably Jewish you may also have felt. The prodigal son who once upset the tribal balance—and perhaps even invigorated the tribe's health—may well, in his old age, have a sentimental urge to go back home, but isn't this a bit premature in you, aren't you really too young to have it so fully developed?”

Nathan Zuckerman to Philip Roth
The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)

Eric R. Kandel photo

“The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna…”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)
Variant: The Age of Insight is a product of my subsequent fascination with the intellectual history of Vienna from 1890 to 1918, as well as my interest in Austrian modernist art, psychoanalysis, art history, and the brain science that is my life's work. In this book I examine the ongoing dialogue between art and science that had its origins in fin-de-siècle Vienna...

John Keats photo

“Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.”

Stanza 3
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Łukasz Pawlikowski photo

“Art does not ask about the age, just expects a lot.”

Łukasz Pawlikowski (1997) Polish cellist

Sztuka nie pyta o wiek, tylko oczekuje wiele.
A little cellist from Krakow conquers the world, warszawa.naszemiasto.pl, 2008-04-02, Polish http://warszawa.naszemiasto.pl/archiwum/1664386,maly-wiolonczelista-z-krakowa-podbija-swiat,id,t.html,

Jules Feiffer photo

“It is not size or age or childishness that separates children from adults. It is "responsibility."”

Jules Feiffer (1929) American cartoonist, screenwriter and playwright

The Great Comic Book Heroes http://books.google.com/books?id=zxbuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+is+not+size+or+age+or+childishness+that+separates+children+from+adults+It+is+responsibility%22&pg=PA75#v=onepage (1965)

Will Eisner photo
Geert Wilders photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Margaret Mead photo

“[Among the Arapeh… both father and mother are held responsible for child care by the entire community…] If one comments upon a middle-aged man as good-looking, the people answer: 'Good-looking? Ye-e-e-s? But you should have seen him before he bore all those children.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 55; cited inWomen, History, and Theory : The Essays of Joan Kelly (1986), by Joan Kelly, p. 137

Shaun Ellis photo
Michael Shermer photo

“We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

quoted in [Berger, Kevin, August 23, 2006, http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/08/23/shermer/print.html, "The joys of life without God", Salon.com, 2006-08-26]

André Maurois photo

“We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Lennox Lewis photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo

“Contemporary art -- the field we are usually working in because there's money -- is mostly concerned with systems or systematic concepts. In the context of their work, artists adapt models of individual art-specific or economic or political systems like in a laboratory, to reveal the true nature of these systems by deconstructing them. So would it be fair to say that by their chameleon-like adaptation they are attempting to generate a similar system? Well… the corporate change in the art market has aged somewhat in the meantime and looks almost as old as the 'New Economy'. Now even the last snotty brat has realized that all the hogwash about the creative industries, sponsoring, fund-raising, the whole load of bullshit about the beautiful new art enterprises, was not much more than the awful veneer on the stupid, crass fanfare of neo-liberal liberation teleology. What is the truth behind the shifting spheres of activity between computer graphics, web design and the rest of all those frequency-orientated nerd pursuits? A lonely business with other lonely people at their terminals. And in the meantime the other part of the corporate identity has incidentally wasted whole countries like Argentina or Iceland. That's the real truth of the matter.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-1

G. K. Chesterton photo
Ernst Hanfstaengl photo
Daniel Levitin photo
John F. Kennedy photo

“Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age — too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Quoted in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Arthur Schlesinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), page 1017. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx According to a footnote in Schlesinger's manuscript (1st draft, page 1378), this was stated on February 13, 1961.
Attributed

Sinclair Lewis photo
Tom Robbins photo
D.H. Lawrence photo
Joseph Conrad photo
Lindsay Lohan photo
Aristophanés photo

“Just Discourse: Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.”

tr. Athen. 1912, vol. 1, p. 359 http://books.google.com/books?id=9vpxAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Do+not+bandy+words+with+your+father%2C+nor+treat+him+as+a+dotard%2C+nor+reproach+the+old+man%2C+who+has+cherished+you%2C+with+his+age%22
Clouds, line 998-999
Clouds (423 BC)

Frank Buckles photo

“I didn't lie; nobody calls me a liar, I may have increased my age.”

Frank Buckles (1901–2011) United States Army soldier and centenarian

Joking on joining the Army at age 15.
CNN March 8, 2008.

Adolf Eichmann photo
Edward Gibbon photo

“In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hussyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. 5, pages:391–392.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Beverly Sills photo

“In youth, we run into difficulties. In old age, difficulties run into us.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

Josh Billings, as quoted in Mac's Giant Book of Quips and Quotes (1983) by E. C. McKenzie
Misattributed

Pierre-Jean de Béranger photo
Walter Pater photo

“Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

Pico Della Mirandola
The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Nigel Lythgoe photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
H. G. Wells photo
Anne Bradstreet photo

“Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”

Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) Anglo-American poet

3.
Meditations Divine and Moral (1664)

Charles Bukowski photo
John McCain photo
Alfred Russel Wallace photo

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn photo
Amanda Wyss photo
Immanuel Kant photo
Max Scheler photo
Newton Lee photo
Martin Farquhar Tupper photo
Franklin Pierce Adams photo

“My own view is that a vegetarian diet may in fact hasten the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah). The more we live as if this were the messianic age the closer we are to it.”

Rami M. Shapiro (1951) American rabbi

Reported in Judaism and Vegetarianism by Richard H. Schwartz (New York: Lantern Books, 2001), in the “ Statements of support https://archive.org/stream/JudaismAndVegetarianism#page/n3/mode/2up” section.

Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Jay Leiderman photo
Irshad Manji photo

“In Islam's golden age, so much progress was made that it became the basis of the European Renaissance. We Muslims have to change ourselves, that's the main difference. We can't keep blaming America or Israel for our misery.”

Irshad Manji (1968) Feminist from Canada, author, journalist, activist

Süddeutsche Zeitung http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1346.html May 16, 2007

Alphonse de Lamartine photo
Steve Jobs photo

“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

On the early rivalry between Macintosh and "IBM-compatible" computers based on Microsoft's DOS, as quoted in Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward (1987) by Jeffrey S. Young, p. 235
1980s

Lydia Maria Child photo
Algis Budrys photo
Gottfried Feder photo
Pauline Kael photo
Albert Einstein photo
Damian Lillard photo
Diogenes Laërtius photo

“Another of his sayings was, that education was the best viaticum of old age.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Aristotle, 9.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 5: The Peripatetics

Adlai Stevenson photo
Edvard Munch photo

“it was the period I think of as the age of the pillow... What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

on his painting 'The sick Child'
As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011
after 1930

Auguste Rodin photo

“I know very well that one must fight, for one is often in contradiction to the spirit of the age.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

As quoted in "Rodin freed human spirit" in The Des Moines Register (7 January 2007) http://www.dmregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070107/ENT01/701070305
21st century

Gore Vidal photo

“I used to be able to summon up scenes at will, but now aging memory is so busy weeding its own garden that, promiscuously, it pulls up roses as well as crabgrass.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 12: The Guest of the Blue Nuns, p. 162

François Mignet photo
Samuel C. Florman photo
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre photo

“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children to the vegetable régime. The peoples living on vegetable foods, are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence, from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by for his virtues, Archytas, by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh diet introduces with many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon the beauty of the body and upon the tranquillity of the mind. This regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.”

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814) writer and botanist from France

Vœux d'un solitaire, pour servir de suite aux "Études de la nature", as quoted in The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (University of Illinois Press, 2003, p. 175 https://books.google.it/books?id=o9ugCcZ13BMC&pg=PA175)

Wilt Chamberlain photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Vladimir Lenin photo
Ben Klassen photo
Alan Sillitoe photo
Christine O'Donnell photo

“The generation of young people that questioned the establishment in the '60s is now middle-aged, and has become the establishment itself. Moral absolutes have been eliminated, "feel-good" religions created, and free sex legitimized, paving the way for disposable marriages. The results of these tailor-made values are new strains of sexually transmitted diseases, more potent drugs, more broken families and out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates and worrisome suicide rates.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Christine
O'Donnell
Opposite Attraction; Pitching Abstinence to the Young and the Restless at the HFStival
1997-06-15
The Washington Post
C1
2010-09-15
Remembering Christine O'Donnell: Praising Helms, Missing Lenny and Squiggy, and Worries of Rampant Satanism
Kyle
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/remembering-christine-odonnell-praising-helms-missing-lenny-and-squiggy-and-worries-rampant-
2010-10-20

Rihanna photo