Quotes about age
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“Girls under the age of fourteen are the most frightening creatures I have ever come across.”

Melina Marchetta book On the Jellicoe Road

Source: On the Jellicoe Road

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”

William Styron (1925–2006) American novelist and essayist

Writers at Work (1958)

Happiness, Literature

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

People, Feeling

“The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.”

Lucille Ball (1911–1989) American actress and businesswoman

Lie, Secret, Funny, Birthday

“Matter of internal security - the age-old cry of the oppressor.
Picard”

Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991) American television screenwriter and producer

Cry

“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: Point to Point Navigation

Sex, Appearance

“Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.”

Roald Dahl book The Twits

Source: The Twits

“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) American activist

Youth, Powerful

“Age is a hell of a price to pay for wisdom”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Wisdom, Hell

“A man learns with age, if he is lucky.”

Patricia Briggs (1965) American writer

Source: When Demons Walk

Learning

“Lunatics have no age. If we were crazy, you and I, we might be a great deal younger.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

“At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.”

Jonathan Tropper (1970) American writer

This is Where I Leave You

Loneliness

“You understand your responsibilities better than guardians twice your age. You'll do what you have to do to succeed.”

Richelle Mead Vampire Academy

Source: Vampire Academy

Understanding

“The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

God and the Bible (1875)

Thinking, Sense

“I think people would live a bit longer if they didn't know how old they were. Age puts restrictions on things.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

People, Thinking

“In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

The Books in My Life (1952) Preface (2nd edition. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1969, p. 12)

Way, Learning

“age has its own glory, beauty, and wisdom that belong to it.”

Joseph Murphy The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Source: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind

Wisdom, Beauty

“In my dreams, I never have an age.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Dreams

“I don't mind pointing out some of the failings of old age, because we are all headed in that direction, unless of course we take our own lives before we become a burden. I'm not advocating suicide, oh wait, I guess I am.”

Amy Sedaris (1961) American comedian

Source: I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence

Suicide, Waiting

“And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Source: Selected Poetry

“All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.”

David Nicholls book Starter for Ten

Source: Starter for Ten

Life, People, Nature, Parting

“Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.”

David Gemmell (1948–2006) British author of heroic fantasy

Source: Fall of Kings

Death, People

“I have reached an age where if someone tells me to wear socks, I dont have to”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“I am every age, up to my own.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

“But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love, Soul, Science

“To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of 26 and 18 is to do pretty well”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

Happiness, Perfection

“I have a feeling that when I'm Stormy's age, these everyday moments will be what I remember: Peter's head bent, biting into a chocolate chip cookie; the sun coming through the cafeteria window, bouncing off his brown hair; him looking at me.”

Jenny Han book Always and Forever, Lara Jean

Source: Always and Forever, Lara Jean

Feeling, Sun

“She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

Life, Literature, Reading

“Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else…”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"Let's Not Climb the Washington Monument Tonight"
Versus (1949)

People, Personality

“The wise man tests before he talks. The critic but follows the fad of a cynical and apathetic age.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

“You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture”

Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her

Source: This Is How You Lose Her

Love, Girl

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

“Nothing is really lost or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing…
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers
left from early fires,
… shall duly flame again”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Life, World, Birth

“Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness, possesses you. And in this materialistic age, a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.”

Peace Pilgrim (1908–1981) American non-denominational spiritual teacher

“There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Books, Reading, Friendship, For Friend

“At my age, if I make it up, it’s still an old saying.”

Robert Jordan The Fires of Heaven

Lini
(15 October 1993)
Source: The Fires of Heaven

“Spiritual practices help us move from identifying with the ego to identifying with the soul. Old age does that for you too. It spiritualizes people naturally.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

People, Soul, Nature, Help

“he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Time

“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“We're so arrogant, aren't we? So afraid of age, we do everything we can to prevent it. We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone. Someone who doesn't drive you to commit murder or doesn't humiliate you beyond repair.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

“As the Wheel of Time turns, places wear many names. Men wear many names, many faces. Different faces, but always the same man. Yet no one knows the Great Pattern the Wheel weaves, or even the Pattern of an Age. We can only watch, and study, and hope.”

Robert Jordan book The Eye of the World

Source: The Eye of the World

Men, Hope, Study, Time

“So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.”

Charles Frazier (1950) American writer

Love, Life, Pain, Hate

“Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

Time

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.”

Robert Jordan book The Eye of the World

Source: The Eye of the World

Time

“Here's my question: What age are you when you're in Heaven?”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Question

“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

Letter to Ernest Jones (1933), as quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993) by Robert Andrews, p. 779
1930s

Books

“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem—in my opinion—to characterize our age.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"The Common Language of Science", a broadcast for Science, Conference, London, 28 September 1941. Published in Advancement of Science, London, Vol. 2, No. 5. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954), the quote appearing on this page http://books.google.com/books?id=OeUoXHoAJMsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT357#v=onepage&q&f=false. 1940s

Perfection

“At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p. m.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Art, Music

“Patriotism in the female s*x is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. Even in the freest countries our property is subject to the control and disposal of our partners, to whom the laws have given a sovereign authority. Deprived of a voice in legislation, obliged to submit to those laws which are imposed upon us, is it not sufficient to make us indifferent to the public welfare? Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.”

Abigail Adams (1744–1818) 2nd First Lady of the United States (1797–1801)

Letter to John Adams (17 June 1782)

Law, Sex, History, Country

“The necessity for leaders to possess optimism and ego serves to answer the age-old question: Are leaders born or are they made? They are born. A leader is born with an optimistic disposition or she is not. If she is not, then no amount of "optimism training" is going to make her view the world in an overwhelmingly positive, opportunistic light.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: The One Thing You Need to Know (2005), p. 69

World, Optimism, Question, Light

“It's the fate of the lion in winter: all his billions, all his television channels cannot rescue him from the mockery that rains down on the aged lecher, his powers visibly waning.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

On aging, as quoted in "Did I say This? in The Observer (20 April 2008)
2008

Fate, Winter

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 1 ; Lead paragraph

Life, Death, Pain, War

“Insurance companies nowadays apply the principle of so-called 'selection by insurance'; this means that they take into consideration the fact that persons who enter early into insurance contracts are on the average of a different type and have a different distribution of death ages from persons from persons admitted to the insurance at a more advanced age.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

First Lecture, The Definition of Probability, p. 18
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Death, Personality

“Darab Khan who had been sent with a strong force to punish the Rajputs of Khandela and to demolish the great temple of the place, attacked the place on the 8th March/5th Safar, and slew the three hundred and odd men who made a bold defence, not one of them escaping alive. [16 October 1678] The temples of Khandela and Sanula and all other temples in the neighbourhood were demolished…'On Sunday, the 25th May/24th Rabi. S., Khan Jahan Bahadur came from Jodhpur, after demolishing the temples and bringing with himself some cart-loads of idols, and had audience of the Emperor, who highly praised him and ordered that the idols, which were mostly jewelled, gold en, silver y, bronze, copper or stone, should be cast in the yard (jilaukhanah) of the Court and under the steps of the Jam'a mosque, to be trodden on. They remained so for some time and at last their very names were lost' [25 May 1679]…Ruhullah Khan and Ekkataz Khan went to demolish the great temple in front of the Rana's palace, which was one of the rarest buildings of the age and the chief cause of the destruction of life and property of the despised worshippers Twenty machator Rajputs who were sitting in the temple vowed to give up their lives; first one of them came out to fight, killed some and was then himself slain, then came out another and so on, until every one of the twenty perished, after killing a large number of the imperialists including the trusted slave, Ikhlas. The temple was found empty. The hewers broke the images…..”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Maasir-i-alamgiri, translated into English by Sir Jadu-Nath Sarkar, Calcutta, 1947, pp. 107-120, also quoted in part in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers. Different translation: “Darab Khan was sent with a strong force to punish the Rajputs of Khandela and demolish the great temple of that place.” (M.A. 171.) “He attacked the place on 8th March 1679, and pulled down the temples of Khandela and Sanula and all other temples in the neighbourhood.”(M.A. 173.) Sarkar, Jadunath (1972). History of Aurangzib: Volume III. App. V.
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1670s

Life, Men, Strong, Time

“What do you do when old prophecies come true? I’ve never met a priest who honestly expected miracles in his own lifetime. For them miracles are like good wine, best when aged.”

Glen Cook Dreams of Steel

Source: Dreams of Steel (1990), Chapter (p. 430)

Wine

“It is to be hoped that such legislation may be another step toward the great consummation to be reached, when no man shall be permitted, directly or indirectly, under any guise, excuse, or form of law, to hold his fellow-man in bondage. I am of opinion also that it is the duty of the United States, as contributing toward that end, and required by the spirit of the age in which we live, to provide by suitable legislation that no citizen of the United States shall hold slaves as property in any other country or be interested therein.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Seventh State of the Union Address (1875)
Context: I am happy to announce the passage of an act by the General Cortes of Portugal, proclaimed since the adjournment of Congress, for the abolition of servitude in the Portuguese colonies. It is to be hoped that such legislation may be another step toward the great consummation to be reached, when no man shall be permitted, directly or indirectly, under any guise, excuse, or form of law, to hold his fellow-man in bondage. I am of opinion also that it is the duty of the United States, as contributing toward that end, and required by the spirit of the age in which we live, to provide by suitable legislation that no citizen of the United States shall hold slaves as property in any other country or be interested therein.

Law, Hope, Country

“In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious. … The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 1: Bloodlines

Sense, Time, Personality

“The Leader of the Future 2 is divided into five parts. In Part One, our book begins where it should, with Peter Drucker’s vision of leadership… Part Two, "Leading in a Diverse World," begins with the recognized world authority on building a learning organization. "Systems Citizenship" presents MIT’s Peter Senge at his best, as he challenges us to understand systems, implement systems intelligence, and build partnerships that are a mandate for the new millennium… Part Three, "Leading in a Time of Crisis and Complexity," begins with Ron Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Ron describes new approaches to solving leadership dilemmas as he challenges leaders in "Anchoring Leadership in the Work of Adaptive Progress"… Part Four, "Leading Organizations of the Future," shows how changing context has an impact leadership needs, demanding changes in leadership styles. Charles Handy is one of the great social philosophers of our time… Part Five, "The Quality and Character of the Leader of the Future," begins with one of the most influential thought leaders in history, Stephen Covey. In "Leading in the Knowledge Worker Age."”

Marshall Goldsmith (1949) American author of leadership and management literature

Source: The leader of the future 2, 2006, p. xiv-xvii; preview

Books, World, School, History

“Old age is second childhood.”

Aristophanés The Clouds

Clouds, line 1417
Clouds (423 BC)

Childhood

“It is not just age; it's accomplishments, it's experience. I have far more experience than many others that sought the office of vice president of this country. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. I will be prepared to deal with the people in the Bush administration, if that unfortunate event would ever occur.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Vice-presidential candidates' debate (5 October 1988); Lloyd Bentsen's famous response included the line "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy".

People, Country

“It is very sobering to realize just what the future holds for a boy of my age. On the other hand it is a practical challenge to a man’s courage and personal integrity. A man who talks but is afraid to act, who sacrifices principle to expediency whenever real danger threatens is not worthy to keep and enjoy what he has. He is not worthy of his background and heritage who kowtows to tyranny in order to cling to his temporary safety and comfort…I trust I will have the courage to act as I speak come what may. I will not be easy – but should, therefore, can be done.”

Nile Kinnick (1918–1943) College football player

Letter to his grandmother (April 29, 1941)

Boy, Courage, Future, Personality

“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now"”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled.
2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Hunger, God, Peace, Hope

“For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal’s “sin”; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism … In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him “better.””

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 38-39

“Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,
We may our ends by our beginnings know.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

Of Prudence, line 225.

Youth

“In this age, I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony—even vicious harmony—on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.”

James Mattis (1950) 26th and current United States Secretary of Defense; United States Marine Corps general

At the May 2010 JFCOM Conference Ares blog, Aviation Week (June 2010) http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3ae790de68-06df-40d7-99bd-1297ed2bbeab&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest

Home

“The great British Library — an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read: one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair, and draw buckets full of classic lore, or “pure English, undefiled” wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Art of Book-Making".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Literature, Reading, Drawing

“One of the most helpful things I introduced (and of very considerable consequence to Canadians) was my ultimate success in persuading my colleagues (after continuing battle)to reduce the qualifying age for aged pensioners from seventy to sixty-five over a five year period.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 119

Success, Help

“Turning finally to the question raised, to be precise, it appears that [Hillary] Clinton received a slight majority of the vote. The apparent decisive victory [of Donald Trump] has to do with curious features of American politics: among other factors, the Electoral College residue of the founding of the country as an alliance of separate states; the winner-take-all system in each state; the arrangement of congressional districts (sometimes by gerrymandering) to provide greater weight to rural votes (in past elections, and probably this one too, Democrats have had a comfortable margin of victory in the popular vote for the House, but hold a minority of seats); the very high rate of abstention (usually close to half in presidential elections, this one included). Of some significance for the future is the fact that in the age 18-25 range, Clinton won handily, and Sanders had an even higher level of support. How much this matters depends on what kind of future humanity will face.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

First published in Truthout http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38360-trump-in-the-white-house-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky on 14 November 2016. Then published in the book Optimism over Despair in 2017, pages 121-122 (ISBN 9780241981979). Quotes 2010s, 2016

Question, Support, Decision, Appearance

“What eie doth not pitty to see the great weaknes and decay of our ancient and common mother the earth, which now is grown so aged and stricken in yeares, and so wounded at the hart with the ploughman's goad, that she beginneth to faint under the husbandman's hand, and groaneth for the decay of her natural balsam. For whose good health and recovery, and for the better comfort of sundry simple and needy farmers of this land, I have partly undertaken these strange labours, altogether abhorring from my profession, that they might both know and practise some farther secrets in their husbandry, for the better manuring of their leane and barren groundes with some new sorts of marie not yet knowne, or not sufficiently regarded by the best experienced men of our daies.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Cited in: Robert Kemp Philp. The History of Progress in Great Britain http://books.google.com/books?id=s1oBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA72, Vol. 1 (1859). p. 72 Text is about the "motive of the author for thus undertaking books of instruction upon husbandry." The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Men, Health, Secret, Nature

“Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

The Ultimate Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice lists this as "probably not by Einstein". However, this post from quoteinvestigator.com http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/29/common-sense/ traces it to a reasonably plausible source: the second part of a three-part series by Lincoln Barrett (former editor of 'Life' magazine) titled "The Universe and Dr. Einstein" in Harper's Magazine, from May 1948, in which Barrett wrote "But as Einstein has pointed out, common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen." Since he didn't put the statement in quotes it could be a paraphrase, and "as Einstein has pointed out" makes it unclear whether Einstein said this personally to Barrett or Barrett was recalling a quote of Einstein's he'd seen elsewhere. In any case, the interview was republished in a book of the same title, and Einstein wrote a foreword which praised Barrett's work on the book, so it's likely he read the quote about common sense and at least had no objection to it, whether or not he recalled making the specific comment. Unsourced variant: Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen. Disputed

Sense

“The number one book of the ages was written by a committee, and it was called The Bible.”

Louis B. Mayer (1884–1957) American film producer

To a writer who complained that his work was being changed.
Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed)

Books

“Horsed upon hippogriffs, the hags of night
Shall come to visit me; and once an age
Some desperate wight, or wizard, gaunt and grey,
Shall seek this spot by help of hidden lore,
To ask of things forgotten or to come.
But who, beholding me, shall dare defy
The wrath of Jove? Since vain is wisdom's boast,
And impotent the knowledge that o'erleaps
The dusky bourne of time. Twere better far
That gods should quaff their nectar merrily,
And men sing out the day like grasshoppers,
So may they haply lull the watchful thunder.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Wisdom, Men, God, Knowledge

“My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1980s, Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms, 1980, p. 5

Family, Faith, Business, Childhood

“Consider some of the qualities of typical modernistic poetry: very interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation, "texture"; extreme intensity, forced emotion — violence; a good deal of obscurity; emphasis on sensation, perceptual nuances; emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole; experimental or novel qualities of some sort; a tendency toward external formlessness and internal disorganization — these are justified, generally, as the disorganization required to express a disorganized age, or, alternatively, as newly discovered and more complex types of organization; an extremely personal style — refine your singularities; lack of restraint — all tendencies are forced to their limits; there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective; the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public — he is, essentially, removed; poetry is primarily lyric, intensive — the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details; poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational style of dramatic monologue; and so on and so on. This complex of qualities is essentially romantic; and the poetry that exhibits it represents the culminating point of romanticism.”

Randall Jarrell book Five Young American Poets

"A Note on Poetry," preface to The Rage for the Lost Penny: Five Young American Poets (New Directions, 1940) [p. 49]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Dreams, Sense, Parting, Personality

“To assume someone because of their age or gender, that they don't pose a threat, would be wrong.”

Sean Spicer (1971) American political strategist and former White House Press Secretary and Communications Director for President…

' White House Tells Dissenters in State Department: 'Get With the Program' or Quit http://time.com/4653958/white-house-dissent-state-department-response/', Time, January 30 2017 (defending the detention of a five year old child)

“I must confess that my estimate of Lovecraft would not have pleased his most ardent admirers. The view I expressed in that book was that, while Lovecraft was distinctly a creative genius in his own way, his pessimism should not be taken too seriously; that it was the pessimism of a sick recluse, and had about it an element of rassentiment, a kind of desire to take revenge on the world that rejected him. In short, Lovecraft was a 19th century romantic, born in the wrong time. Most men of genius dislike their own age, but the really great ones impose their own vision on the age. The weak ones turn away into a world of gloomy fantasy.”

Colin Wilson book The Mind Parasites

Source: The Mind Parasites (1967), p. 2

Men, Books, World, Way

“Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 -- if one of them had... yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem.”

Colm Tóibín (1955) Irish novelist and writer

Austen was a woeful speller . . . http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/books-arts/austen-was-a-woeful-speller-26694366.html, Irish Independent (30 October 2010)

Way, Boy, Problem

“It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today - this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

"Great Parliamentary Speeches" CD.
Maiden speech in the House of Lords, 13 November 1984.
1980s

Men, World, Heart, Country

“In the summer of 1928, Hitler aged 39, was the Nazi party leader, and he fell in love with Geli Raubal, his 20 year old niece, the daughter of his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafés and theaters in Munich. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munich and throughout Nazi circles in southern Germany. By 1931, some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Love, Beauty, Mountain, Nature

“A work upon the plan originally contemplated by the Author seems still to be required, to initiate the young and uninstructed in the study of those MEDALS 0F CREATION—those electrotypes of nature—the mineralized remains of the plants and animals which successively flourished in the earlier ages of our planet, in periods incalculably remote, and long antecedent to all human history and tradition. With this conviction the present volumes are offered… as a guide for the Student and the Amateur Collector of fossil remains; for the intelligent Observer who may desire to possess a general knowledge of the subject, without intending to pursue Geology as a science; and for the Tourist who may wish, in the course of his travels, to employ profitably a leisure hour in quest of those interesting memorials of the ancient physical revolutions of our globe, which he will find everywhere presented to his observation.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Preface to the First Edition
The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Travel, History, Intelligence, Nature

“Great things are not accomplished with physical strength and agility," says Cicero, "but through consultation, authority, and the mature wisdom which old age, far from lacking, is endowed with abundantly.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Wisdom

“The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power. Through the ages the constantly expanding grasp of government has been liberty's greatest threat.”

Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) U.S. Army general of the army, field marshal of the Army of the Philippines

Source: Reminiscences (1964), p. 417

“It is only after prolonged, and often painful, self-examination that any of us can realise the extent to which our minds are in bondage to words, to phrases, to formulae. We are the children of an age which spends the best energies of its life in the discussion of life, in an atmosphere of deferred fulfillment, continually postponing the act of living to the work of mentally preparing to live. Preoccupied with these preparations, we become skeptical as to all that lies beyond; and if for a moment we pass the boundary which separates the area of discussion from the fact discussed, our minds become troubled and amazed, and we conclude, strangely enough, that we are in a land of moonshine and of dreams.”

L. P. Jacks (1860–1955) British educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister

The Usurpation Of Language (1910)

Life, Pain, Children, Dreams

“It needs satisfaction just like any other, & you really really really get frustrated if you can't have it. You can get such guilt complexes, too, for having any. But why did the Lord make you able to have children at the age of 11, 12 & 13 if you weren't supposed to have sex then?”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Child Brides!

Children, Sex

“The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism. Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe. Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine. Let them take courage amid perplexities and perils, for it may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all the men in all the lands than we could ever have planned if we had not marched together through the fire.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

The Second World War (1939–1945)
Source: Broadcast (12 November 1939), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 81

Men, World, Way, Feeling

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

Husayn ibn Ali (626–680) The grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, p. 218 http://books.google.com/books?id=VvXSAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA218&dq=Edward+Gibbon+Hosein&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4eogT_7ZEZToiALbpIGBCA&ved=0CEkQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=hosein&f=false Quotes by non-Muslims

Death, Distant

“This victory took place in the year 878, eight hundred and seventy-eight; the island of Sankhodar was never conquered in any age by any king of the past. It is related that the Sultan performed two genuflexions of namaz out of thanksgiving at the time of demolishing the temple and breaking the idols of Jagat. He grew eloquent in recitation of praise out of gratitude to God. The Muslims raised calls to namaz (azan) by loud voice from top of temples… He built a masjid there.”

Mahmud Begada (1458–1511) Sultan of Gujarat

Sankhodhar (Gujarat) Mirat-i-Ahmdi, translated into English by M.F. Lokhandwala, Baroda, 1965,pp 47-52

God, Time, Past, Victory

“At times it seems to me that I am living my life backwards, and that at the approach of old age my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there and that I had the greatest trouble removing.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“An Unprejudiced Mind,” pp. 319-320
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

Life, Youth, Soul, Parent

“If we're looking for a rationale other than "Loughner was nuts," I think the more relevant facts about him are that he was an atheist who detested religion and religious people, made lots of references to satanic New Age "conscience dreaming" (sic) and was involved in the occult.
When a fellow participant on a UFO website wrote a lengthy response to Loughner's question about "what is wrong or right with the current date?" which included the subordinate clause, "a day in Christ is as a thousand years," Loughner fixated on that one line, railing, "I won't listen to that fictitious crap without the author. This is laughable to notice a gospel or writing related to Christ."”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Mud Libel" (19 January 2011).
2011

People, Religion, Dreams, Question

“I gambled and I lost. I failed in securing my options for this choice for myself, but I succeeded in verifying the Dark Age is still with us.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Between the dying and the dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian's life and the battle to Legalize Euthanasia"‎ - Page 247 - by Neal Nicol, Harry Wylie - 2006
2000s, 2006

“The heterodoxy of one age will become the orthodoxy of the next”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Defence at his Heresy Trial

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men, People, Books, World

“Good Reader, I suspect I may have written some Things twice; if not the same in Words, yet in Sense, which I desire you to pass by favourably; forasmuch as you may well think, it was as difficult and dull a Thing for me, in so great a Number of independent Sentences, to find out the Repetitions, as it would be in a vast Heap of different Coins and Medals, confusedly thrown together, to pick out here and there one that bore the same and like Inscription, with some other among them. Besides the Pains, such a Search would cost me more Time, than I can afford it; for my Glass of Life running now low, I must not suffer one Sand to fall in waste, nor spend one Minute in picking of Straws. And moreover, my aged Eyes being grown weak and dim, I fear they will become quite dark, by much perusing and poring; or at least so far, so as to render me unable to perfect several Papers now lying by me, which I would willingly make a Present of to you.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Excerpt from Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II, To the Reader (Prefatory Remarks).
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Life, Pain, Fear, Search

“The New Age music: "gave the opportunity for untalented people to make very boring music."”

Vangelis (1943) Greek composer of electronic, progressive, ambient, jazz, pop rock, and orchestral music

2005

People, Music

“I’m a huge lover of animals. My mother wasn’t the best, but despite an abusive childhood, we always had a lot of pets growing up. I was basically raised on a farm with horses, chickens, ducks and cats. We did a lot of rescuing. At early age, I became a vegetarian. There was a lot of resistance from family — “It will stunt your growth. It can’t be healthy.””

Corey Feldman (1971) American actor

… Going vegetarian at such a young age, it was a stance for myself. "Corey Feldman brings Lost Boys Ball, Truth Movement to House of Blues" https://lasvegasweekly.com/blogs/luxe-life/2010/oct/21/corey-feldman-brings-lost-boys-ball-truth-movement/, interview with the Las Vegas Weekly (October 21, 2010).

Family, Cats, Lovers, Animals