John Henrik Clarke Quotes

What we might have been dealing with here - with the building of the Pyramids - is an age that got lost. Man had to learn again what they previously had known.

Man arose to high moral vision two thousand years before the Hebrew nation was born.

As I get older and I get more of this dialogue and I lose more and more brain cells, it really does become the most difficult part of the job!

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]

Age is information failure. The body loses fluency.

Literature is a fragment of a fragment. Of all that ever happened, or has been said, but a fraction has been written; and of this but little is extant.

Just because you're old that doesn't mean you're more forgetful. The same people whose names I can't remember now I couldn't remember fifty years ago. . .

I must admit I am nervous about getting Alzheimer's. Once it hits, I might tell my best joke and never know it.

Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those that are useless to wisdom.

That folly of old age which is called dotage is peculiar to silly old men, not to age itself.

Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, / Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether.

Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.

Think about all that we've lost that has been said orally because nobody was taking it down. I feel very fortunate to live in a time where we have so many different voices. We have a much richer literature than we've ever had, and we can know America so much better.

She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

It is wonderful to me that old men should not be sensible that their minds keep pace with their bodies in the progress of decay.

There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.

I am already sensible of decay in the power of walking, and find my memory not so faithful as it used to be. This may be partly owing to the incessant current of new matter flowing constantly through it; but I ascribe to years their share in it also.

Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that’s why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden.

As you get older, you choose friends based on not only what feels resonant and warm but if they're bringing something to your life. My women friends are incredibly intelligent. There's no posturing, no competition. Especially in Los Angeles, I see pockets of friends who are very competitive, and I think, What is the point? I would rather be alone in bed with a book than have a girlfriend who is like that.

Age imprints more wrinkles a in the mind, than it does in the face, and souls are never, or very rarely seen, that in growing old do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all together, both towards his perfection and decay.

In Truth I found myself incorrigible with respect to Order; and now I am grown old, and my Memory bad, I feel very sensibly the want of it.