age

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child isgrown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.

—Millay, Edna St Vincent

My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow, An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For Lady you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

—Marvell, Andrew

Architecture is the will of the age conceived in spatial terms.

—Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig

   Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted.

—McCarthy,Joseph R(aymond)

An age in her embraces passed, Would seem a winter's day; Where life and light, with envious haste, Are torn and snatched away. But, oh how slowly minutes roll, When absent from her eyes That feed my love, which is my soul, It languishes and dies.

—Rochester,JohnWilmot, 2nd Earl of

Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

—Bastard,Thomas

The age is dull and mean. Men creep, Not walk.

—Whittier,John Greenleaf

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, whichforgivesitselfeverything, isforgiven nothing.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Age is our reconciliation with dullness.

—Lowell, RobertTraill Spence,Jr

   'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!'said Mr Gradgrind† 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!'† 'Bitzer'said Thomas Gradgrind.'Your definition of a horse.' 'Quadruped.Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer. 'Now girl number twenty,'said Mr Gradgrind.'You know what a horse is.'

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

'The age of chivalry is past,'said May Dacre.'Bores have succeeded to dragons.'

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract. 306

—Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)

   The feelings withwhichwe facethisnewage of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercyare reconciled, and the judge and the brother are one.

—Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow

The city is old, out of step with the century, but age only seems to have quickened its elements† Relics from the past continually pierce the present. Some dream of love survives the sandstone apartment houses.

—Cheever,JohnWilliam

They shall grow not 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.

—Binyon, (Robert) Laurence

   I have now reached the point where I can look over the great art of antiquityand its Renaissance.But, for myself, I cannot find anyartistic connection with ourown times. And to want to create something outside of one's own age strikes me as suspect.

—Klee, Paul

I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs By the known rules of ancient liberty, When strait a barbarous noise environs me Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs.

—Milton,John

Only when onehas lost all curiosity has onereached the age to write an autobiography.

—Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn

In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.

—Miller, Henry Valentine

What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there anotherTroy for her to burn?

—Yeats,W(illiam) B(utler)

Another age shall see the golden ear Imbrown the slope, and nod on the parterre, Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.

—Pope, Alexander

Of all the great Victorian writers, he was probably the most antagonistic to theVictorian age itself.

—Wilson, Edmund

Anyone happy in this age and place Is daft or corrupt. Better to abdicate From a material and spiritual terrain Fit only for barbarians.

—Fuller, Roy Broadbent

   We are essentially fragile.We don't have to wait for the sword or some other equally sensational weapon to strike us down† There are so many ways of us dying it's astonishing any of us choose old age.

—Bainbridge, Dame Beryl Margaret

At the age of14 I discovered writing as an escape from†being called a sissy by the neighborhood kids, and Miss Nancy by my father.

—Williams,TennesseeThomas Lanier

'You are old, Father William,'the young man said, 'And your hair has become very white; And yet you incessantly stand on your headö Do you think, at your age, it is right?' 'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son, 'I feared it might injure the brain; But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again.' See Southey 805:96.

—Dodgson

La cruaute¤  , bien loin d'e"  tre un vice, est le premier sentiment qu'imprime en nous la nature; l'enfant brise son hochet, mord le te¤  ton de sa nourrice, e¤  trangle son oiseau, bien avant que d'avoir l'a"  ge de raison. Far from being a vice, cruelty is the primary feeling that nature imprints in us. The infant breaks its rattle, bites its nurse's nipple, and strangles a bird, well before reaching the age of reason.

—Sade, Donatien Alphonse Fran c° ois, Marquis de

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain! Blind among enemies,O worse than chains, Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age! Light the prime work of God to me is extinct, And all her various objects of delight Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eas'd, Inferior to the vilest now become Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me, They creep, yet see, I dark in light expos'd To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, 586 Within doors, or without, still as a fool, In power of others, never in my own; Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

—Milton,John

Brought up inanage when ladies apparently rolledalong on wheels, Mr Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves.

—Huxley, Aldous Leonard

Thou shalt be buried in a good old age.

—Bible (Old Testament)

Envyand wrathshortenthelife, and carefulnessbringeth age before the time.

—Bible (Apocrypha)

I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

—Lee, Laurie

Were we required to characterise this age of ours byany single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical,Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of the word.

—Carlyle,Thomas

I hold that the characteristic of the present age is craving credulity.

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

A manner rude and wild Is common at your age.

—Belloc, (Joseph) Hilaire Pierre

   To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

—Burke, Edmund

If I can rejoice for a moment, Death at an early age would still be a long life.

—Yu«  an Mei

Youmust dressaccording toyourage, yourpursuits, your object in life.

—Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

All women's dresses, in every age and country, are merely variations on the eternal struggle between the admitted desire to dress and the unadmitted desire to undress.

—LinYutang

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

—Thomas, Dylan Marlais

Ours is essentiallya tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

—Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)

Every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies.

—Dryden,John

   Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

—Berger,John Peter

For every philosopher, in every age, the first question must be:Just what is philosophy?

—Sparshott, Francis

Fashion is the image of an age and can tells its story better than a speech.

—Lagerfeld, Karl

For if such holy song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And speckled vanity Will sicken soon and die.

—Milton,John

Self-parody is the first portent of age.

—McMurtry, LarryJeff

Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music, Liberty!

—Wordsworth,William

Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

—Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah ne¤  e  Camberg

The atrocious crime of being a young man, which [Walpole] has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their youth, and not of those who continue ignorant in spite of their age and experience.

—Pitt,William, 1st Earl of Chatham known as  the Elder

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

—Hemingway, Ernest Millar

In everyage and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, ofthetwosexes, hasusurped thepowers ofthe state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.

—Gibbon, Edward

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

—Amis, Martin Louis

I am becoming like the Irish Census, broken down by Age, Sex, and Religion.

—MacRe¤  amoinn, Sean Seamas Criostoir

The language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.

—Gray,Thomas

And may at last my weary age Find out the peaceful hermitage, The hairy gown and mossy cell, Where I may sit and rightly spell Of every star that heaven doth shew, And every herb that sips the dew, Till old experience to attain To something like prophetic strain.

—Milton,John

I bequeath my soul to God† For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next age.

—Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans

My times be inThy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and Death complete the same!

—Browning, Robert

Whatever our forefathers were, or whatever they did or suffered, or were enforced to yield unto, we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of exorbitancies, molestations, or arbitrary power.

—Overton, Robert

I readilyadmit that I am often more serious than I should be at my age or in my present circumstances, yet I know from experiencethat Iamnever lessgiventomelancholy thanwhen I am keenlyapplying the feeble powers of my fallen to be the laughing stock of children.

—Sidney, Sir Philip

Not bad. Most people myage are dead.You could look it up.

—Stengel, Casey (Charles Dillon)

Stalin†that great lover of peace, a man of giant stature who moulded, as few other men have done, the destinies of his age† The occasion is not merely the passing away of a great figure but perhaps the ending of an historic era.

—Nehru,Jawaharlal

A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.

—Irving,Washington

   A new glass age has begun, which is equal in beauty to the old one of Gothic windows.

—Korn, Arthur

If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist's couch.

—McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall

There is no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

—Wharton, Edith Newbold ne¤  e Jones

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it'stheway people look and laugh, and runup the steps of omnibuses.

—Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen

In the days of my youth I remembered my God! And He hath not forgotten myage.

—Southey, Robert

There is nothing in Socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

—Durant,WilliamJames

He was not of an age, but for all time!

—Jonson, Ben

But now that age comes A moment of joy is harder and harder to get.

—Po Chu«  -I

Of no ageönor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

—Melville, Herman

Youth, large, lusty, lovingöyouth full of grace, force, fascination, Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

—Whitman,Walt(er)

I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played, but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.

—Evelyn,John

Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age.

—Doyle, SirArthur Conan

In order to imbue civilization with sound principles and enliven it with the spirit of the gospel, it is not enough to be illumined with the gift of faith and enkindled with the desire of forwarding a good cause. For this end it is necessary to take an active part in the various organizationsand influencethemfromwithin. And since our present age is one of outstanding scientific and technical progress and excellence, one will not be able to enter these organizations and work effectively from within unless he is scientifically competent, technically capableand skilled in the practice of his own profession.

—PopeJohn XXIII originally Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli

Perfections of means and confusion of goals seemöin my opinionöto characterize our age.

—Einstein, Albert

Must then a Christ perish in torment in everyage to save those that have no imagination?

—Shaw, George Bernard

Say, Britain, could you ever boast,ö Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

—Swift,Jonathan

Whenever possible print a woman's age.

—Christiansen, Arthur

She had reached an age where she thought she could not stand to knowany more†she pushed any discovery aside with embarassment.

—Munro, Alice ne¤  e Laidlaw

Thus our twin souls in one shall grow, And teach the world new love, Redeem the age and sex, and show A flame fate dares not move: And courting death to be our friend, Our lives, together too, shall end.

—Philips, Katherine ne¤  e Fowler

Why should he, with wealth and honour blest, Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? Punish a body which he could not please; Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? And all to leave what with his toil he won To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son.

—Dryden,John

Virgil and Horace [were] the severest writers of the severest age.

—Dryden,John

So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower, No more doth flourish after first decay, That erst was sought to deck both bed and bower, Of manya lady, and many a paramour: Gather therefore the rose, whilst yet is prime, For soon comes age, that will her pride deflower: Gather the rose of love, whilst yet is time, Whilst loving thou mayst love'  d be with equal crime.

—Spenser, Edmund

Soul of the Age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!

—Jonson, Ben

Mr Wordsworth'sgeniusisa pure emanationofthe Spirit ofthe Age.Had helived inanyother period of the world, he would never have been heard of.

—Hazlitt,William

I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer. To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman's age in half a minuteöand I do. But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can, Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!

—Gilbert, Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck)

One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

—Rado,James

For to be yong I wald not, for my wis, Off all this warld to mak me lord and king: The more of age, the nerar hevynnis blis.

—Henryson, Robert

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

We were now actually in the inner sanctuary of the Nanda Devi Basin, and at each step I experienced that subtlethrill which anyone of imagination must feel when treading hitherto unexplored country† My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment ?

—Shipton, Eric Earle

   Why didn't Eternity have this deformed age aborted ? Its birthmark is the stamp of a newspaper, its medium is printer's ink, and in its veins flows ink.

—Kraus, Karl

So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature: This is old age; but then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change To withered weak and grey.

—Milton,John

This is the editorial age, and the most intellectual of all ages.

—Bennett,James Gordon, Snr

   Even such isTime, which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust, Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days, And from which earth, and grave, and dust The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

—Raleigh, Sir Walter

All, all of a piece throughout; Thy chase had a beast in view; Thy wars brought nothing about; Thy lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an old age is out, And time to begin a new.

—Dryden,John

Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor†not that men are wicked†but that men know so little of men.

—Du Bois,W(illiam) E(dward) B(urghardt)

My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age.

—Irving,Washington

The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.

—Kronenberger, Louis

Body-line was not an incident, it was not an accident, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket.

—James, C(yril) L(ionel) R(obert)

Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show; We may our ends by our beginnings know.

—Denham, SirJohn

And almost every one when age, Disease, or sorrow strike him, Inclines to think there is a God, Or something very like him.

—Clough, Arthur Hugh

When you're my age, you just never risk being illö because then everyone says: Oh, he's done for.

—Gide, Andre¤   Paul Guillaume

When you've reached myage, and your friends are beginning to worry about you, blind dates are a way of life.

—Epstein,JuliusJ

What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.

—Rochdale

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn; Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam, Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe