W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

You spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.

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

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

I just think age is meaningless. It's a system we've all agreed to that supposedly signals when we should develop, reach our peak and go downhill, as they say. It interferes with our natural growth.

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.

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.

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

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.

If you're asking me to acknowledge that I've gotten older, I can do that.

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.

Nobody stays young forever.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.

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.

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

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.

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending; a negligent youth is usually attended by an ignorant middle age, and both by an empty old age.