Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

One time, I was young. I was skinny. I was elegant. Getting old is terrible.

The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

and nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old

A frail gift is beauty, which grows less as time draws on, and is devoured by its own years.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Gather kittens while you may, Time brings only sorrow; And the kittens of today; Will be old cats tomorrow.

The future may be an enemy. Time can turn happy days and nights into nothing.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

The surest poison is time.

I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

Time, waxing old, doth all things purify.

Time touches all things with a destroying hand.

Time bears away all things.

Tomorrow! - Why, tomorrow I may be Myself with yesterday's sev'n thousand years.

As for old age, embrace and love it. It abounds with pleasure if you know how to use it. The gradually declining years are among the sweetest in a man's life, and I maintain that, even when they have reached the extreme limit, they have their pleasure still.

Some grow young, some grow cold...

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

The older we become, the more certain our future.

Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure.

Happiness has not to all the same name: to Youth she is known as the Future; Age knows her as the Dream.