Quotes
Quotes about Age
What rage for fame attends both great and small!
Better be damned than mentioned not at all.
The tree of deepest root is found
Least willing still to quit the ground:
'T was therefore said by ancient sages,
That love of life increased with years
So much, that in our latter stages,
When pain grows sharp and sickness rages,
The greatest love of life appears.
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee.
Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations,--entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of the general government in its whole constitutional vigour, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;...freedom of religion; freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected,--these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
Where they do agree on the stage, their unanimity is wonderful.
You shall see them on a beautiful quarto page, where a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin.
Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet
To think how monie counsels sweet,
How monie lengthened sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises.
Torn from their destined page (unworthy meed
Of knightly counsel and heroic deed).
In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill-will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow-men, not knowing what they do.
You 'd scarce expect one of my age
To speak in public on the stage;
And if I chance to fall below
Demosthenes or Cicero,
Don't view me with a critic's eye,
But pass my imperfections by.
Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
He has spent all his life in letting down empty buckets into empty wells; and he is frittering away his age in trying to draw them up again.
The schoolboy whips his taxed top; the beardless youth manages his taxed horse with a taxed bridle on a taxed road; and the dying Englishman, pouring his medicine, which has paid seven per cent, into a spoon that has paid fifteen per cent, flings himself back upon his chintz bed which has paid twenty-two per cent, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death.
And don't confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free.
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
The monumental pomp of age
Was with this goodly personage;
A stature undepressed in size,
Unbent, which rather seemed to rise
In open victory o'er the weight
Of seventy years, to loftier height.
There is a luxury in self-dispraise;
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.
Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man,
Could field or grove, could any spot of earth,
Show to his eye an image of the pangs
Which it hath witnessed,--render back an echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!
And when the stream
Which overflowed the soul was passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left
Deposited upon the silent shore
Of memory images and precious thoughts
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
By happy chance we saw
A twofold image: on a grassy bank
A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood
Another and the same!
Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.
Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth,
When thought is speech, and speech is truth.
On his bold visage middle age
Had slightly press'd its signet sage,
Yet had not quench'd the open truth
And fiery vehemence of youth:
Forward and frolic glee was there,
The will to do, the soul to dare.
Thus aged men, full loth and slow,
The vanities of life forego,
And count their youthful follies o'er,
Till Memory lends her light no more.
