A Quote by May Sarton

Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.

May Sarton

Quote Topics

Age Ascent Grow Illness Light Old Old Age Power Timeless Toward

Quote Author

May Sarton
American - Novelist
May 3, 1912 - July 16, 1995

[D]on't grow old. With age comes caution, which is another name for cowardice.... Whatever else you do in life, don't cultivate a conscience. Without a conscience a man may never be said to grow old. This is an age of very old young men.

Hesketh Pearson

Begging for acknowledgment, or even asking, diminishes dignity and diminishes power.

Will Smith

If you look at the language of illness, you can use it to describe race - you could experience race as an illness. You can experience income level, at many different levels, as a form of illness. You can experience age as an illness. I mean, it's all got an illness component.

Andrew Solomon

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 Montagu

How old are you? If your first reflex is to reply with your chronological age, the number on your birth certificate, you are only one-third correct. There are actually two additional, and more important, indicators of age. And the exciting news is that it is within your power to adjust both of these other "age indicators" and truly grow younger and live longer.

Deepak Chopra

It would be foolish to assert that there is no power above mine. Only the attitude that I take toward it will be quite another than that of the religious age: I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it.

Max Stirner

I am afraid, ... that health begins, after seventy, and often long before, to have a meaning different from that which it had at thirty. But it is culpable to murmur at the established order of the creation, as it is vain to oppose it. He that lives, must grow old; and he that would rather grow old than die, has God to thank for the infirmities of old age.

Lyndon B. Johnson

To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes -- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

Eric Hoffer

Demographics show that we are entering a battle between young and old. I call it the 'Age War.' The young want to hang onto their money to grow their families, businesses, and wealth. The old want the tax and investment dollars of the young to sustain their old age.

Robert Kiyosaki

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

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.

Laurence Binyon

When I did a study of all the coming-of-age movies that meant a lot to me, whether it was 'The Graduate' or 'Rebel Without a Cause' or 'Dead Poet's Society,' they all had that timeless feel. None of them were completely married to the details of their age. They felt timeless in their treatment of it. That's what made them resonate with me.

Stephen Chbosky

You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it - you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.

Tobias Wolff

Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo

Old age is an ordeal, of flesh and mind. Of winding down, of slowing down, of dying cells. It's accepting the loss of physical attractiveness and replacing it with the power and wisdom that can only come with old age.