I spent my 30s fixing everything I broke in my 20s. – Eddie Murphy
Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart. – Caryn Leschen
No one becomes forty without incredulity and a sense of outrage. – Clifford Bax (1886–1962) [Written at age 39, in 1925. —tεᖇ
Any man of forty who is endowed with moderate intelligence has seen—in the light of the uniformity of nature—the entire past and future. – Marcus Aurelius
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. – Voltaire
From forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. – Arthur Schopenhauer
I was cursed or blessed with a prolonged adolescence; I arrived at some seeming maturity when I was past thirty. It was only in my forties that I really began to feel young. By then I was ready for it. – Henry Valentine Miller (1891–1980), “On Turning Eighty”
Forty-five is the age of recklessness for many men, as if in defiance of the decay and death waiting with open arms in the sinister valley at the bottom of the inevitable hill. – Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
Old age begins at forty-six years, according to the common opinion. – Cicero/Holmes
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age. – Victor Hugo
Instead of bewailing a lost youth, a man nowadays begins to wonder, when he reaches my ripe age of forty-two, if ever his past will subside and be comfortably by-gone. – D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930)
The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. – Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down. – T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old. – Oliver Wendell Holmes (Thanks Janice!)
My diseases are an asthma and a dropsy and, what is less curable, seventy-five. – Samuel Johnson
In a dream you are never eighty. – Anne Sexton
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. – Henry Ford
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. – Mark Twain, quoted in Autobiography with Letters by William L. Phelps
I am getting old and the sign of old age is that I begin to philosophize and ponder over problems which should not be my concern at all. – Jawaharlal Nehru
