The Second Sin
Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised, to carry money without spending it and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.
—ANN LANDERS
You are not mature until you expect the unexpected.
—Chicago Tribune
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
You’re never too old to grow up.
—SHIRLEY CONRAN
Savages
You grow up the day you have your first real laugh—at yourself.
—ETHEL BARRYMORE
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
—TOM STOPPARD
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
—HENRI BERGSON
Maturity begins when we’re content to feel we’re right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else wrong.
—SYDNEY J. HARRIS
Maturity is reached the day we don’t need to be lied to about anything.
—FRANK YERBY
Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Youth is when you blame all your troubles on your parents; maturity is when you learn that everything is the fault of the younger generation.
—HAROLD COFFIN
AS WE GROW OLD . . .
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?
—SATCHEL PAIGE
Whatever a man’s age may be, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his buttonhole.
—MARK TWAIN
When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.
—MARTY BUCELLA
in Woman magazine
It’s easier to have the vigor of youth when you’re old than the wisdom of age when you’re young.
—RICHARD J. NEEDHAM
A Friend in Needham, or, A Writer’s Notebook
Adults are obsolete children.
—DR. SEUSS
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
—ANDRÉ BERTHIAUME
Contretemps
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
—CYNTHIA OZICK
The Paris Review
The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.
—MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Memoirs of Hadrian
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and just not think about your age.
—LUCILLE BALL
If youth only knew; if age only could.
—HENRI ESTIENNE
When the problem is not so much resisting temptation as finding it, you may just be getting older.
—Los Angeles Times
The person who says youth is a state of mind invariably has more state of mind than youth.
—American Farm and Home Almanac
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
—ABRAHAM SUTZKEVER
Most people say that as you get old, you have to give up things. I think you get old because you give up things.
—SEN. THEODORE FRANCIS GREEN
You don’t stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing.
—MICHAEL PRITCHARD
We are only young once. That is all society can stand.
—BOB BOWEN
I’ve always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
—ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH
The joy that is felt at the sight of new-fallen snow is inversely proportional to the age of the beholder.
—PAUL SWEENEY
Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
—JEANNE MOREAU
Age appears best in four things: old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust and old authors to read.
—FRANCIS BACON
Growing up is usually so painful that people make comedies out of it to soften the memory.
—JOHN GREENWALD
Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.
—MALCOLM DE CHAZAL
When I no longer thrill to the first snow of the season, I’ll know I’m growing old.
—LADY BIRD JOHNSON
Just remember, when you’re over the hill, you begin to pick up speed.
—CHARLES SCHULZ
People are living longer than ever before, a phenomenon undoubtedly made necessary by the 30-year mortgage.
—DOUG LARSON
There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later.
—MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.
—Quoted by RAYMOND A. MICHEL
in The Leaf
Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel just as good as ever.
—DON MARQUIS
Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.
—HAROLD COFFIN
Middle age is when you begin to wonder who put the quicksand into the hourglass of time.
—The Orben Comedy Letter
Midlife crisis is that moment when you realize your children and your clothes are about the same age.
—BILL TAMMEUS
in Kansas City Star
Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.
—BILL VAUGHN
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
—VOLTAIRE
I don’t know what the big deal is about old age. Old people who shine from inside look 10 to 20 years younger.
—DOLLY PARTON
in Ladies’ Home Journal
I have no romantic feelings about age. Either you are interesting at any age or you are not. There is nothing particularly interesting about being old—or being young, for that matter.
—KATHARINE HEPBURN
Old age is having too much room in the house and not enough in the medicine cabinet.
—Orben’s Current Comedy
When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
—VICTOR HUGO
A young boy is a theory; an old man is a fact.
—ED HOWE
Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much.
—MARGARET WILLOUR
The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
—H. L. MENCKEN
Prejudices
Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
—TOM WILSON
You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
—JOHN NUVEEN
Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head.
—JAMES E. SHAPIRO
Meditations From the Breakdown Lane
&nbs
p; The best thing about being young is, if you had to do it all over again, you would still have time.
—SANDRA CLARKE
If life were just, we would be born old and achieve youth about the time we’d saved enough to enjoy it.
—JIM FIEBIG
Everybody has been young before, but not everybody has been old before.
—AFRICAN PROVERB
You will stay young as long as you learn, form new habits and don’t mind being contradicted.
—MARIE VON EBNER-ESCHENBACH
You are young at any age if you are planning for tomorrow.
—The Sword of the Lord
A grownup is a child with layers on.
—WOODY HARRELSON
When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how old you are.
—CARY GRANT
To age with dignity and with courage cuts close to what it is to be a man.
—ROGER KAHN
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.
—MONTAIGNE
The older you get, the more important it is not to act your age.
—ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT
The trick is growing up without growing old.
—CASEY STENGEL
Growing older is not upsetting; being perceived as old is.
—KENNY ROGERS
The trouble with class reunions is that old flames have become even older.
—DOUG LARSON
A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR.
After thirty, a body has a mind of its own.
—BETTE MIDLER
We grow neither better nor worse as we grow old, but more like ourselves.
—MAY LAMBERTON BECKER
The best thing about growing older is that it takes such a long time.
—WALTERS KEMP
One advantage in growing older is that you can stand for more and fall for less.
—MONTA CRANE
The best birthdays of all are those that haven’t arrived yet.
—ROBERT ORBEN
The older I grow, the more I listen to people who don’t talk much.
—GERMAIN G. GLIDDEN
We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.
—FRANK A. CLARK
MEMORY IS THE DIARY . . .
Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.
—OSCAR WILDE
Count reminiscences like money.
—CARL SANDBURG
It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
—BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Animal Dreams
We do not remember days; we remember moments.
—CESARE PAVESE
The Burning Brand
The moment may be temporary, but the memory is forever.
—BUD MEYER
Don’t brood on what’s past, but never forget it either.
—THOMAS H. RADDALL
Recall it as often as you wish, a happy memory never wears out.
—LIBBIE FUDIM
Each of us is the accumulation of our memories.
—ALAN LOY MCGINNIS
The Romance Factor
One form of loneliness is to have a memory and no one to share it with.
—PHYLLIS ROSE
in Hers: Through Women’s Eyes
Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.
—CORRIE TEN BOOM WITH JOHN AND ELIZABETH SHERRILL
The Hiding Place
May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.
—Quoted by PAUL DICKSON in Toasts
Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn’t all a dream?
—ASHLEIGH BRILLIANT
To live without a memory is to live alone.
—GILLES MARCOTTE
There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.
—RICHARD LLEWELLYN
How Green Was My Valley
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
—SAUL BELLOW
Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
—CHARLES R. SWINDOLL
The Strong Family
You never know when you’re making a memory.
—RICKIE LEE JONES
“Young Blood”
Our memories are card indexes—consulted, and then put back in disorder, by authorities whom we do not control.
—CYRIL CONNOLLY
What is memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.
—STANLEY KAUFFMANN
The New Republic
Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things.
—PIERCE HARRIS
Atlanta Journal
I’m always fascinated by the way memory diffuses fact.
—DIANE SAWYER
in TV Guide
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.
—MARK TWAIN
You can close your eyes to reality but not to memories.
—STANISLAW J. LEC
Unkempt Thoughts
There are times when forgetting can be just as important as remembering—and even more difficult.
—HARRY AND JOAN MIER
Happiness Begins Before Breakfast
Remembering is a dream that comes in waves.
—HELGA SANDBUR
“. . . Where Love Begins”
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
—BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Animal Dreams
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
—JEAN PAUL RICHTER
The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living.
—JEAN COCTEAU
There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories.
—MARY MORRIS
Crossroads
Some folks never exaggerate—they just remember big.
—AUDREY SNEAD
The older a man gets, the farther he had to walk to school as a boy.
—Commercial Appeal (Danville, Virginia)
God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December.
—JAMES M. BARRIE
No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
—LOUIS L’AMOUR
Ride the River
IF YOU’RE YEARNING FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS . . .
If you’re yearning for the good old days, just turn off the air conditioning.
—GRIFF NIBLACK
in Indianapolis News
We have all got our “good old days” tucked away inside our hearts, and we return to them in dreams like cats to favorite armchairs.
—BRIAN CARTER
Where The Dream Begins
Things ain’t what they used to be and probably never was.
—WILL ROGERS
&
nbsp; Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.
—DOUG LARSON
In the old days, when things got rough, what you did was without.
—BILL COPELAND
Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense and the past perfect.
—The United Church Observer
The essence of nostalgia is an awareness that what has been will never be again.
—MILTON S. EISENHOWER
The Wine Is Bitter
There has never been an age that did not applaud the past and lament the present.
—LILLIAN EICHLER WATSON
Light from Many Lamps
Nothing seems to go as far as it did. Even nostalgia doesn’t reach back as far as it used to.
—Changing Times
You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.
Quotable Quotes Page 3