Aeschylus Quotes

Old men, what are they? Fast fading the leaf, Three-footed they walk, yet frail as a child, As a dream set afloat in the daylight.

Beyond age, leaf withered, man goes three footed no stronger than a child is, a dream that falters in daylight.

Dreams age faster than dreamers.

We are but older children, dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near.

A man growing old becomes a child again.

I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Wrecked on the lee shore of age.

When Michelangelo was an old man, he drew himself sitting in a child's pushcart.

Alas, how right the ancient saying is: We, who are old, are nothing else but noise And shape. Like mimicries of dreams we go, And have no wits, although we think us wise.

Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

It says, I think, that at root that we're children, or we'd like to be. And the best of us each keep as much of that childhood with us as we grow into adulthood, as we can muster... And even after we're past the point of being able to play the game with any skill, if we love it, then it's like Peter Pan - we remain boys forever, we don't die.

...an old man is twice a child.

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

I have legs of iron, but to tell you the truth, they're starting to rust and buckle a bit.

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

Old men are children for the second time.

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

None thrives for long upon the happiest dream.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

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.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.