Joseph Addison Quotes

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

If you're always battling against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy, because it's going to happen anyhow.

Every stage of life longs for others. When one is young and eager, one aspires to maturity, and everyone older would like nothing better than to be young.

Its really most remarkable how the human race is so seldom satisfied with what its got. Give a man the world and he's pining for the moon.

why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you

We arrive at the various stages of life quite as novices.

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.

The romance of life begins and ends with two blank pages. Age and extreme old age.

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

An old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as the young man who is unable to embrace it.

In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.

Your tears come easy, when you're young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you're old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

Enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age.. each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.

When we are young we lay up for old age; when we are old we save for death.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone.

A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

Of all the portions of life it is in the two twilights, childhood and age, that tears fall with the most frequency; like the dew at dawn and eve.

What you desire when young, you have in abundance when old.

[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.

We are never content with our lot.

I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it. It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.

So may'st thou live, till like ripe fruit thou drop Into thy mother's lap, or be with ease Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature: This is old age; but then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change To withered weak and grey.