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aging - aging
3 - youth |
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It
takes a long time
to become young.
Pablo Picasso |
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Some
people never seem to grow old. Always active in
thought,
always ready to adopt new ideas, they are never chargeable
to fogeyism. Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied,
settled,
yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is,
and are the first to find the best of what will be.
William
Shakespeare
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Each part of life has its own
pleasures. Each has its own abundant
harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in
body,
but we need never grow old in mind and spirit. No one
is as old as
to think he or she cannot live one more year.
Cicero |
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Development
can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth,
beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very
end of life,
given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities. .
. .
In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age.
We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our
nineties.
Betty
Friedan
We grow
neither better or worse as we get old, but more like
ourselves.
May L. Becker
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The
whole of life is a journey toward youthful
old age, toward self-contemplation, love,
gaiety, and, in a fundamental sense, the most
gratifying time of our lives. . . . "Old
age"
should be a harvest time when the riches
of life are reaped and enjoyed, while it
continues to be a special period for
self-development and expansion.
Ashley
Montague
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Most people don't grow up. Most people
age. They find parking
spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have
children,
and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.
Maya Angelou
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The
thing you are ripening toward is the fruit of your
life.
It will make you bright inside, no
matter what you
are outside. It is a shining
thing.
Stewart
Edward White
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What remains to me of strength becomes more
precious for what is lost.
I have lost one ear,
but was never so alive to sweet sounds as now. My
sight is so far impaired that the brightness
in which nature was revealed to
me in my youth is dimmed,
but I never looked on nature
with such pure
joy as now. My limbs soon tire, but I
never felt it such a privilege to
move
about in the open air, under the sky in sight of the
infinity of creation,
as at this moment. I almost think that my simple food, eaten by rule, was
never
relished so well. I am grateful
then for my earthly tabernacle,
though it does creak and
shake not a little.
William Ellery Channing
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Parts
of the aging process are scary, of course, but the more we
know about them,
the less they need be. That is why I wish we were more
deliberate, in our early years,
to prepare for this condition. It would leave a lot of
us freed to enjoy the obvious
rewards of being old. . . . What is important is that our
dispassionate acceptance
of attrition be matched by a full use of everything that has
ever happened in all
the long wonderful-ghastly years to free a person's mind
from his or her body. . .
to use the experience, both great and evil, so that physical
annoyances are
surmountable in an alert and even mirthful appreciation of
life itself.
Mary
Francis Kennedy Fisher
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Youth
is not a time of life--it is a state of mind. Nobody
grows old
by merely living a number of years; people grow old by
deserting their ideals.
Years may wrinkle your skin, but to give up enthusiasm
wrinkles your soul.
You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as
young as your
self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope,
as old as your despair.
In the central place of your heart there is a recording
chamber; so long as it
receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage--so
long are you young.
When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with
the snow
of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then--and only
then--are you grown old.
Samuel Ullman
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When grace combines with wrinkles, it is
admirable. There is
an indescribable light of dawn about intensely
happy old
age. . . . The young person is handsome,
but the old, superb.
Victor Hugo
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I
believe the second half of one's life is meant to be better
than
the first half. The first half is finding out how you
do it.
And the second half is enjoying it.
Francis Leak |
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The
span of life vouchsafed us, three-score and ten,
is short
enough, if the spirit
gets too haughty and
wants to live forever;
but on the other
hand,
it is
also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. .
. .
Anyone who is wise
and has lived long enough to
witness the changes of fashion
and morals
and politics through the rise and fall of three
generations
should be perfectly
content to
rise from his or her seat
and go away saying
"It was a good show" when the curtain falls.
Lin
Yutang |
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The
great thing about getting older is that you
don't lose all the other ages you've been.
Madeleine L'Engle |
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aging -
aging 3 - youth
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Do not deprive me of my age. I have
earned it.
May Sarton
The Poet and the Donkey: A Novel |
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Up
to one's last breath, one may retain the simple joys of
childhood,
the poetic ecstasies of the young person, the enthusiasms
of maturity. Right to the end, one may intoxicate
one's spirit
with flowers, with beauty and with smiles.
Eliphas
Levi
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You’re
never too old to become younger.
Mae West
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How
old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you was?
Satchel Paige |
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A
human heart can never grow old if it takes a lively interest
in the pairing of birds,
the reproduction of flowers, and the
changing tints of
autumn leaves.
Lydia Maria
Child |
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Physically,
we get older and then we die. Yet spiritually, whether
we go
backward or forward is a matter not of the body but of
consciousness. When
we think about age differently, then our experience of it
changes. We can be
physically older but emotionally and psychologically
younger. Some of us were
in a state of decay in our 20s and are in a state of
re-birth in our 60s or 70s.
King Solomon, who supposedly was the wisest of all men,
described his youth
as his winter and his advanced years as his summer. We
can be older than
we used to be yet feel much younger than we are.
Marianne
Williamson |
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Never have I enjoyed youth so
thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing
Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now
all these descriptions of the friends of my youth
and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk
the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful, than it
ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties
and little annoyances of actual living.
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except
spirit. And spirit can enter a human being
perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell
there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of
adventure. But it must be in solitude. I
do not need or desire to hobnob artificially with
other old men in order to revisit them in their
salad days, and to renew my own. In Rome, in
the eternal city, I feel nearer to my own past, and
to the whole past and future of the world, than I
should in any cemetery or in any museum of
relics.
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 comes from long perspectives
and broad foundations. Everything shines then
for the spirit by its own light in its own place and
time; but not as it shone in its own restless
eyes. For in its own eyes each person and each
place was the centre of a universe full of
threatening and tempting things; but old age, having
less intensity at the centre has more clearness at
the circumference, and knows that just because
spirit, at each point, is a private centre for all
things, no one point, no one phase of spirit is
materially a public centre for all the rest.
George Santayana |
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As I accepted the change of the golden hair
of my childhood to the
reddish-brown hair of my youth without regret, so I also
accept my
silver hair--and I am ready to accept the time when my
hair and the
rest of my clay garment returns to the dust from which it
came, while
my spirit goes on to freer living. It is the season for my
hair to be silver,
and each season has its lessons to teach. Each season of
life is
wonderful if you have learned the lessons of the season
before. It is
only when you go on with lessons unlearned that you wish for
a return.
Peace
Pilgrim |
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When
Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on
two
sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard
all
over his face, and the inscription, "I am
still learning."
Simone
de Beauvoir
There is only one solution if old age is not to be
an absurd
parody of our former life, and that is to go on
pursuing
ends that give existence meaning-- devotion to
individuals,
to groups or causes, social, political, intellectual
or creative work.
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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 |
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aging -
aging 3 - youth
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Today
I am 65 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy
my
age. A lot of people resist transition and therefore never
allow themselves
to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it
is; once
you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take
advantage
of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience,
but you are riding on another level. It's completely
liberating.
Nikki Giovanni |
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[Women's
magazines] ignore older women or pretend that they don’t
exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women,
and when
they feature celebrities who are over sixty, "retouching
artists" conspire
to "help" beautiful women look more beautiful,
i.e., less than their age.
By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s
60-year-old face
looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse,
60-year-old
readers look in the mirror and think they are too old,
because they’re
comparing themselves to some retouched face
smiling back at them from a magazine.
Dalma Heyn |
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You just don’t make decisions about what
you’re going to be like
when you are old. I
know that I am making that decision right now.
Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world
and God
in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take
over in
old age. Every
time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am
deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical
old man. Our
yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and
our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.
John Powell |
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"If most of us surrender to the passing of
years," says Mr. Kemp, "and let them make us
old, but certain others defy the passage of an even
greater number of years and retain the vigor and
enjoyment of life associated with youth, can it be
possible that aging is really our own fault? Is
the effect that passing years have on our bodies
really an individual matter? Here is what some
modern medical scientists have to say upon this point.
"After a conference of medical and surgical
specialists at the Decourcy Clinic in Cincinnati some
years ago, the following report was issued:
'Time is not toxic. All of those who develop a
time-neurosis subscribe to the prevalent superstition
that time is in some way a poison exerting a
mysterious cumulative action. . . time has no effect
on human tissues under any conditions. . . vigor does
not necessarily vary inversely with the age of an
adult. Belief in the effects of time by those
who subscribe to such a belief is the thing that acts
as a poison.'
"To put it another way, there is no scientific
basis for believing, as most of us do, that the
passage of years automatically causes our bodies to
age. [And, presumably, that would go for spirit
and mind as well.] 'It is ignorance of the truth
about the passage of time,' the report continues,
'that causes us to cringe in fear before the
accumulation of years. We need not surrender to
age, if our minds are sufficiently enlightened.'"
Mr. Kemp continues by telling us that a Michigan
doctor, Frederick C. Swartz, debunked the so-called
infirmities of age. "'The forgetful mind,
the doddering gait, the shaky hand--these are caused
by the lack of physical and mental exertion, and not
by the passage of time. Our present conception
of the aging process must be shattered, and our
already brainwashed oldsters made to see the nature of
their ailments. Daily mental and physical
exercise practiced with some degree of self-discipline
should raise the life-expectancy figure ten years in
one generation.'"
Norman
Vincent Peale |
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Our
concept that a person has a useful life span of just so many
years,
and that on their sixtieth birthday, or sixty-second, or
sixty-fifth, or
whatever it may be, their productive capacity suddenly comes
to an
end, is a monstrous and inhuman concept. We must be
flexible in our
response to the gradually declining productivity of the
aging, and
recognize that there also comes with age a gradually
increasing
capacity to contribute to society.
Abraham Kaplan |
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The life
which like the sun grows larger at its setting is the ideal.
Walter M. Bortz |
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