On Age
cur-mudg-eon (cur-muj’un), n. [origin unknown] 1. archaic: a crusty, ill-tempered, churlish old man. 2. modern: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner.
“The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.”
— Jean Kerr
“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
— H. L. Mencken
“We are always the same age inside.”
— Gertrude Stein
“It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of buses.”
— Virginia Woolf
“Many people think old age is a disease, something to be thwarted if possible. But someone has said that if any period is a disease, it is youth. Age is recovering from it.”
— T. C. Myers
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.”
— Proverb
“Age: that period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we no longer have the enterprise to commit.”
— Ambrose Bierce
“At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgment.”
— Benjamin Franklin
“Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are born old, and some never grow so.”
— Tyron Edwards
“It takes a long time to become young.”
— Pablo Picasso
“There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age–I missed it coming and going.”
— J.B. Priestly
