George Jean Nathan Quotes

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

Things are NEVER what they seem, Pa, I thought. I used to think they were, but I was wrong or stupid or blind or something. Old folks are forever complaining about their failing eyesight, but I think your vision gets better as you get older. Mine surely was.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose.

Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger". "That is because you are older, little one" answered he. "Not because you are?" "I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger".

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.

When I was younger, I was really anti-Hollywood. Now I'm more accepting of it because I'm less of a snob.

I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.

When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

You see things differently at 40 than you do at 31. Especially if you got to 40 the way I did.

When I was 18, I thought my father was pretty dumb. After a while when I got to be 21, I was amazed to find out how much he'd learned in three years.

A young man is a theory, an old man is a fact.

What I've observed and what I've imagined - and definitely what I'm hoping - happens as you get older is that there's a mellowing, an acceptance that comes with time. I guess that I'll find out.

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

The real sadness of fifty is not that you change so much but that you change so little.

Because I'm not the same today as I was in '58, or '59 or even '71.

It's the same as Keith Richards. People still ask him the same questions they asked him 30 years ago, even though he's a completely different person. And I'm a completely different person than I was 15 years ago.

You think about getting old, but when you get there, it's not what you thought it would be.

There are things that you write when you're 20 and there are things that you write when you're 40 and then there are things that you write when you're old.

I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'

When I was younger, I took everything seriously, and I still do to some degree.

What applies when we're younger maybe doesn't so much when we get a little bit older.

He is an old glove, but he looked like the old Glove.

The older you get, the more you've done.