Kent Nerburn Quotes

We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8.

Youth, what man's age is like to be, doth show; We may our ends by our beginnings know.

I went from adolescence to senility, trying to bypass maturity.

When you are young, nothing is more important than football, but as you get older, you get married, have kids and lose people. Then you realise your family is more important. This comes with age.

Well-being changes as we move through life, which is why a child's version of it cannot be the same as an old person's.

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

I think for all of us, as we age, there are always a few moments when you are shocked.

The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.

Old age is but a second childhood.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

It is noticeable how intuitively in age we go back with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged, careworn son, to listen with infant laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn; and feel most delight in the returning spring.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time.

With our parents we bury our past, with our children our future.

For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90

...with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.

It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an old woman. I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every state.

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the past.

I look like this because I'm alive," Reagan said. "Because I've had experiences. Do you understand?

It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.