Horace Walpole Quotes

I feel like the older I get, the more I start to think about life in general. All the clichés that people tell you, the ones that you hear over and over and over again, there's a reason they're cliché, there's a reason you hear them over and over again, because it's all true. As much as you don't wanna hear it, it's true. You'll find out later on, like "Man, they're all right."

In growing old, we become more foolish - and more wise.

Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey.

It is bad enough to see young fools, but worse to see old fools.

Change, like youth, is purely wasted on the young.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

The great thing about living until you get a bit older if you are a writer, and especially a poet, is that you have more life to reflect on. And I think that if I am better now - and I think that I am probably better than I was - is because that I simply have more to think about, more to get under control, more to understand.

In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.

Age is wisdom if one has lived ones life properly.

I wish I knew as much about anything today as I knew about everything when I was twenty.

When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.

Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

Treasures are not for youth; at twenty years of age, one does not know how to be rich, or how to be loved.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.

As you get old, you live and learn.

For there is assuredly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom, and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

You're learning things. As you get older, you're experiencing them. You learn about what it means to be sacrificial. Then, you get married or something like that and you think, "Oh, wow! This is the real deal."

It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, anymore than they grow stronger or healthier or honest.

If you're lucky enough to get old, I think you should celebrate it.

Experience unveils too late the snares laid for youth; it is the white frost which discovers the spider's web when the flies are no longer there to be caught.

I'm getting older, and it happens. You don't care as much. I don't care about too much anymore. I've got to think about that a little bit.

I guess that's the upside of not being young anymore... You know from experience that the struggle always leads, in some way, to something better.

Are you thankful for not being young?' 'Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don't you see?