Age

A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure in life.
Sometimes wrongly attrib. to Margaret Thatcher, sometimes Virginia Woolf, probably neither

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were too old, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.
Henry David Thoreau

You are never so stupid as when you are 17. Never. When you are eight you’re not stupid. You’re many things, but not stupid. But at 17 you are.
Karl Ove Knausgård

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they’ve forgotten their own.
Margaret Atwood

Education is the brief interval between ignorance and arrogance.
Old adage

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant

Look, the intellects of our lazy youth are asleep, nor do they wake up for the exercise of a single respectable occupation; slumber and languor and, what is more disgusting than slumber and languor, the pursuit of wicked things, has invaded their spirit.
Seneca, first century BC, Controversiae, I, Introduction, on the youth of his day, tr. Amy Richlin

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.
Bill Vaughan

Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.
Ogden Nash

Ecstasy was once the most intense pleasure. Then Wagner. Then Poulet de Bresse. Now it’s a cancelled meeting.
The Rev Richard Coles

Adulthood is when your expenditure on Christmas presents exceeds the value of gifts you expect to receive.
Economist John Kay

Just remember, if she looks young to you / You sure look old to her.
Paul Heaton

Whenever a man’s friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall, ‘Bachelors’

The three ages of man: youth, middle age, and ‘You’re looking well, Enoch!’
Enoch Powell MP on being told by the editor of this book that he looked well

Most people don’t grow up. Most people age.
Maya Angelou

The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off.
College basketball coach Abe Lemons

I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.
Christopher Hitchens

Being a grandfather is like getting a telegram from the mortuary.
Martin Amis

Old Cary Grant fine. How you?
Cary Grant, replying to a telegram to his agent, asking: ‘How old Cary Grant?’

She said she was approaching 40, and I couldn’t help wondering from what direction.
Bob Hope

I am just turning forty and taking my time about it.
Harold Lloyd at seventy-seven, when asked his age, in The Times

You don’t look 75. You did once, though.
Barry Cryer wishing Richard Ingrams a happy birthday

Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
George Burns

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to no one.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, ‘Saint Denis’

Life, as it is called, is for the most of us one long postponement.
Henry Miller

Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair any more is the secret upside of death.
Nora Ephron

Poor old Daddy – just one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness, that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more.
John Osborne, Look Back in Anger

Take care of your friends, because there will come a time when you’re not much fun to be with and there is no reason to like you except out of long-standing habit.
Garrison Keillor

Never speak ill of yourself; your friends will say enough on that subject.
Talleyrand

Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.
Philip Roth

The older you get the stronger the wind gets – and it’s always in your face.
Pablo Picasso