Brooke Astor Quotes

I think I've become more modest as the years have gone on.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

I wish I had been more self-aware earlier, but I think that just comes with age.

One wouldn't want to have the same dilemmas at 50 as one had at 15. And indeed I don't. I have a very different take on life.

So, do I think I'm missing something? I really don't, and I think that comes with age.

You have to treat people gently because we're all in a process. What might seem like a good idea to somebody at 21 is probably not going to seem like a good idea at 50, but you don't know that until you get there.

I'm much more introspective than I was, say, thirty years ago.

Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle aged people but not many wise ones.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we're all going, "God, what a jerk I've been," "How could I have married that guy?" or "How could I have done this or that?" With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, "It wasn't all about them."

The older you get, the better you realize you were.

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.

We almost always see only what's wrong with other people and not what's wrong with us.

It's a good thing I learned some humility and perspective as I got older.

The older I get, the more I feel.

You get kinder when you get into my age range. You think back to how really unkind you were, and how cynical you were and how you tossed things away and you tossed people away, and you didn't care because you were climbing some mountain that you thought you needed to be on top of.

Age does not bring wisdom... but it does give perspective... and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you've resisted.

I'm older and older. With any experience you have, you know more about yourself.

I've experienced a lot for someone my age that a lot of people will be able to relate to.

I've been criticized for not having perspective in the past and I thought that of myself many times but not there.

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.

At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.

Life is not quantifiable in terms of age, but I suppose in my fifties I am more grounded and more at ease in my own skin than when I was younger. I have a confidence that I didn't have before from the experiences I've had.

I guess the older I get, the more understanding and forgiving I've become.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

I suspect I was not the first 21-year-old who thought he knew more than he did. And one of the virtues of age, one of the virtues of getting married and becoming a father, is it often leads one to take a more measured approach to life.