Emil Zatopek Quotes

I'm getting very old and my bones ache. My sins are deserting me, and if I could only have my time over again I'd take care to commit more of them.

If I'd known how old I was going to be I'd have taken better care of myself.

I'm older than I'd like and I'm creaky, but I'm doing alright.

I don't feel any different than I did when I was 40. But I realize mathematically, I'm equidistant between that and 80. I'll keep doing this for a while, but I'm not going to be one of these people who hang on just for the sake of being on the air.

The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven't.

Men may live fools, but fools they cannot die.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.

I am growing old, and my future, so to speak, is already behind me.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

I'm getting older. That's realistic. I can't reverse time. I can slow it down a little bit.

I don't love the fact that gravity is winning as I get older, but there's also a calmness that comes with it, which I'm secretly enjoying.

Christina Stead has a Chinese say, "Our old age is perhaps life's decision about us" or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it.

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.

That's the purpose of old age... To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.

Men regret their life has been ill-spent, but this does not always induce them to make a better use of the time they have yet to live.

Young people in general - and young women in particular - need to understand that they cannot retrieve in their forties the opportunities they threw away in their twenties.

There has to be a womp on the side of the head that defeats and undercuts this game of performance. It has to fall apart. Now unfortunately, that very often does not happen until what I call the second half of life, when there's been enough death in the family and you start experiencing your own physical deterioration.

I think that, with age, people come to realize that death is inevitable. And we need to learn to face it with serenity, wisdom and resignation. Death often frees us from a lot of senseless sufferings.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

Just like that. Gone forever. They will not grow old together. They will never live on a beach by the sea, their hair turned white, dancing in a living room to Billie Holiday or Nat Cole. They will not enter a New York club at midnight and show the poor hip-hop fools how to dance. They will not chuckle together over the endless folly of the world, its vanities and stupid ambitions. They will not hug each other in any chilly New York dawn. Oh, Mary Lou. My baby. My love.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

We should live and learn; but by the time we've learned, it's too late to live.