A Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

W. Somerset Maugham

Quote Topics

Age Am Amazed Because Began Cato Eighty Elder Greek Learn Long Longer Old Old Age Ready Statement Take Tasks Too Would Young Youth

Quote Author

W. Somerset Maugham
British - Novelist
January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

W. Somerset Maugham

At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

Haruki Murakami

I don't know how it is, but the Germans are amazed at me and I am amazed at them for finding anything to be amazed about.

Frederic Chopin

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together; Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care; Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather; Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare. Youth is full sport, age's breath is short; Youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, age is tame. Age, I do abhor thee; youth, I do adore thee.

William Shakespeare

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age.

Anne Bradstreet

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.

Pablo Casals

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Leonardo da Vinci

Youth is full of sport, age's breath is short; youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame.

William Shakespeare

My age is my own private business and I intend to keep it so - if I can. I am not so old that I am ashamed of my age and I am not so young that I couldn't have written my book and that is all the public needs to know about my age.

Margaret Mitchell

A perpetual conflict with natural desires seems to be the lot of our present state. In youth we require something of the tardiness and frigidity of age; and in age we must labour to recall the fire and impetuosity of youth; in youth we must learn to respect, and in age to enjoy.

Lyndon B. Johnson

Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.

Lyman Abbott

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

Agnes Repplier

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.

George Santayana

The young are of age when they twitter like the old; they are driven through school to learn the old song, and, when they have this by heart, they are declared of age.