George Burns Quotes

Wasting time just going mindless, watching your charades. When you were younger, did it occur to you 10 years from then you'd act the same age?

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

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

I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.

I'm much more introspective than I was, say, thirty years ago.

We all have appointments with the past.

The older you get, the better you realize you were.

I'm older, and I wish that a lot of things that I did in my life, I didn't do, but I'm able to talk about it.

[At age 92:] There are places I'd like to return to. But not as I was then but as I am now. 'Cause I'm trying to understand. And I've understood nothing.

I do not have a philosophy about retrospectives. Of course, I cannot change what I have done. What I am doing today, this I can change, in view of whatever I have done before. My retrospectives are like a series of ghosts.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be growing old.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; ... I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.

I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger. I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was stronger

Your heart is as fresh as your face; and that is well. The useless men are those who never change with the years. Many views that I held to in my youth and long afterwards are a pain to me now, and I am carrying away from Thrums memories of errors into which I fell at every stage of my ministry. When you are older you will know that life is a long lesson in humility.

I think I surprise myself.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

If I had one regret in life... it's that I was not more humble at an earlier age.

You have to treat people gently because we're all in a process. What might seem like a good idea to somebody at 21 is probably not going to seem like a good idea at 50, but you don't know that until you get there.

It has been an ache and a joy both to look over this big shoulder of mine at all my yesterdays.

I was in a bar and I said to a friend, 'You know, we've become those 40-year-old guys we used to look at and say, 'Isn't it sad?'

I could have been better. That's my goal now, to be better.