Throughout the years, some very smart people — writers, scientists, philosophers and others — have said some very smart things about getting older.
Their words of wisdom can help us pause for a moment, put things in perspective, and stop taking ourselves so seriously. Here are some of our favorite pearls of wisdom from some of our favorite people:
Henry David Thoreau
“None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”
Ernest Hemingway
“As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
Charlotte Brontë
“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
Albert Einstein
“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Or, as Margery Williams Bianco described it so elegantly in The Velveteen Rabbit, when an old stuffed horse relayed his story:
“‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.'”
On another note, we also think a little humor never hurts….
“You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.” – Woody Allen
