The ultimate lesson is that there is no immunity, no matter our age or the size of our retirement account, from going through constant cycles of integration and disintegration in which we are humbled and hopefully set to rights with the world again.
Age
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.
Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?
In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.
I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.
I’m going through life’s cycles at an alarmingly fast pace, but my persona has a Peter Pan quality: he doesn’t age.
The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.