Top 100 Quotes About Middle Age
#1. I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good. Dissatisfaction
George Eliot
#2. Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age.
Elliot Paul
#3. Middle age is when you go to bed at night and hope you feel better in the morning. Old age is when you go to bed at night and hope you wake up in the morning.
Groucho Marx
#4. The bus had a name too. Elaborately painted letters across the back declared it to be "Old but Sexy." It occurred to me that as I slipped inexorably into middle age, such a title might be the best I myself could hope for.
Lyn Hamilton
#5. Oh, middle age, how awful. He was used to having to look for his lost beauty in his face, but not in his body that had been so tall and strong all his life.
Lauren Groff
#6. As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned.
Claire Messud
#7. Middle age is when, whenever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater.
Denis Norden
#8. In 'The Big Chill,' those characters are in middle age, thinking, 'Oh, God, I've turned into my parents. I've failed.' And in 'Beside Still Waters,' we're showing the struggles of people who actually want to be like their parents and feel they can't live up to their heights.
Chris Lowell
#9. They met middle-age together-a time when women are necessary to one another-and all the petty but grievous insults of greying hair, crowsfeet, and the loathed encumbrances of unwanted flesh, seemed less sordid when faced and fought (though fought spasmodically and with weak wills) gaily together.
Elizabeth Taylor
#10. For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.
Mark Twain
#11. With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, 'natural history.'
Rachel Johnson
#12. In the youth of middle age
square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile
...
A.J. Liebling
#13. Entered my life and have been with me, for better or worse, ever since. A carefree life became a careful one, to some extent. I felt this was the end of youth and that middle age was now upon me.
Oliver Sacks
#14. One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.
Jon Weisman
#15. [On middle age:] ... the very real possibility for you of growing fat as you near death and thus being seen by everyone while you are both DEAD AND FAT ...
Marilyn Suzanne Miller
#16. When one expects to go on "forever" as one does in one's youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see.
Archibald MacLeish
#17. Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
Lillian Gordy Carter
#18. Egdar Derby, mournfully pregnant with patriotism and middle age and imaginary wisdom. And so on.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#19. There's to be a film about my life. I can give this as an exclusive now. Meryl Streep was offered the part but, no, I wanted Kate Winslet. Kylie Minogue is playing me in middle age. In old age, I'm not sure who's going to play me. I haven't got there yet. Perhaps Cate Blanchett. Or Jacki Weaver.
Barry Humphries
#20. In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.
P.D. James
#21. By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.
Danielle Crittenden
#22. When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.
Calvin Trillin
#23. By the proper intakes of vitamins and other nutrients and by following a few other healthful practices from youth or middle age on, you can, I believe, extend your life and years of well-being by twenty-five or even thirty-five years.
Linus Pauling
#24. Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth.
Mason Cooley
#25. Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
Francis Bacon
#26. Middle Age, a restful, welcome break from real life, brings some unique opportunities.
Marilyn Suzanne Miller
#28. I've got a theory that one can always get anything one wants if one will pay the price. And do you know what the price is, nine times out of ten? Compromise. A beastly thing, compromise, but it steals upon you as you near middle age.
Agatha Christie
#29. Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#30. Now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I'd say,
I am rowing, I am rowing ...
Anne Sexton
#31. I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.
Roddy Doyle
#32. A man who's discontents were barely known to himself, awakening in middle age to the horror of self-reflection.
Philip Roth
#33. Middle age: The time when you'll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.
Robert Quillen
#34. The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it.
John Edward Williams
#35. When we were children, there was a silent part of us watching the child. When we were adolescents, there was that same witness watching the adolescent. Middle age, and so on. Every one, now and again, has discovered the self, the one who is watching.
Deepak Chopra
#36. Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#37. The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.
Peter Drucker
#38. Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.
Anne Bradstreet
#39. Middle age is such a low point for well-being; it's at the bottom of a U-shaped curve that shows greater happiness among the younger and older people.
Jed Diamond
#40. I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.
James Thurber
#41. Caught in the moorless place between young adulthood and middle age, we were just learning how to forgive ourselves.
Chloe Benjamin
#42. The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
Gail Sheehy
#43. In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.
Mason Cooley
#44. I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.
Julie Burchill
#45. The worst thing about this particular end (of my youth) and the beginning (of middle age) is that for the first time in my life, I realize I don't know where I'm going. My wants are simple: a job that I like and a guy whom I love. And on the eve of my thirteth, I must face that I am 0 for 2.
Emily Giffin
#46. I'm self-deprecating, but I'm an artist, too. I have to write new songs to chronicle stuff for myself. I write a song like 'Middle Age' or 'Responsibility' or 'I Just Work Here,' and it's about how bleak life can be. But it's real.
Steve Forbert
#48. Middle age is when you realize that you'll never live long enough to try all the recipes you spent thirty years clipping out of newspapers and magazines.
Bill Vaughan
#49. Man has boyhood, adolescence, youth, middle age and senescence, as stages of growth; there are also corresponding stages in the growth of wisdom in him.
Sathya Sai Baba
#50. I do have a thing for eating out; that's one of life's great middle-age pleasures.
Rick Astley
#51. If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.
Erik Erikson
#53. I can feel middle age approaching, but I reckon the trick is to ignore all the signs. I'm lucky in that I've always looked half the age I am. So the way I see it is that I'm still in my twenties!
Marc Warren
#54. Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#55. At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it's the baby boomer thing. But undeniably, I am a man. I have to accept [mortality].
John Travolta
#56. Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.
Lin Yutang
#57. Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
A.C. Grayling
#58. I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.
Stephen Spender
#59. The three true ages of man are youth, middle age, and how the fuck did I get old so soon?
Stephen King
#60. Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
A. N. Wilson
#61. Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.
Don Marquis
#62. It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past.
Alison Bechdel
#63. A man's diary is a record in youth of his sentiments, in middle age of his actions, in old age of his reflections.
John Quincy Adams
#64. It's 2010. I'm forty-three years old. I've just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I'm finally coming into my own.
Therese Fowler
#65. Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
Gore Vidal
#66. Middle age is when you still believe you'll feel better in the morning.
Bob Hope
#67. Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.
Charles Stross
#68. To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.
George Orwell
#69. I do know middle age can bring greater depth, greater wisdom, greater capacity for love, greater capacity for relationship, greater consciousness and desire to serve and awareness of the fate of mankind - all these wonderful things, yes. And I know I'm getting there.
Marianne Williamson
#70. Setting an example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age Conditions are never just right. People who delay action until all factors are favorable do nothing.
William Faulkner
#71. Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
Mason Cooley
#72. There comes a time in one's life, perhaps in middle age, when we stop and assess who we are, and the life we have.
Fennel Hudson
#73. From middle age on, there's nothing more vital to your health and weight control than building lean muscle mass, and the only way that happens is with weight training and exercise.
Suzanne Somers
#74. Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.
Luke Harding
#75. You and I are now nearly in middle age, and have not yet become soured and shrivelled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh, sweet sensations for us.
James A. Garfield
#76. Middle age is when you're faced with two temptations and you choose the one that will get you home by nine o'clock.
Ronald Reagan
#77. But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
Virginia Woolf
#79. The middle age pair lay in bed sans underwear and genetics played out to the fear of all. She had a hot flash and he passed the gas they both were incinerated in an instantaneous flash of thunder, lightning, motion and force. The needed dental records to identify the corpses.
Byron Haskins
#80. Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man's life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#81. After sixty, the self-questioning of middle age is obsolete.
Mason Cooley
#83. The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
Orson Welles
#84. Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
Don Marquis
#85. It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, "on the shelf".
John Le Carre
#86. One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
#87. I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.
James Ellroy
#88. Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.
Doris Day
#89. At middle age, I decide to give up on my dream of being an astronaut and follow my second, to be a writer. Also, I heard there was no smoking in the space station.
Michael Kroft
#90. When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you're watching people around you get sick, you're watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.
Charlie Kaufman
#92. When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.
David Sedaris
#93. Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
Ogden Nash
#94. What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?
Justin Cronin
#95. In youth, in middle age, and now after many battles, I find nothing in me but corruption.
John Knox
#96. You find yourself approaching middle age, playing another scuzzy rock club.
Juliana Hatfield
#97. The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
J.G. Ballard
#98. You know you've reached middle age when your weightlifting consists merely of standing up.
Bob Hope
#99. You are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic, brave or kind.
Garrison Keillor
#100. We all try to be alike in our youth, and individual in our middle age ... although we sometimes mistake eccentricity for individuality.
Alec-Tweedie
