Ovid Quotes

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

I don't believe in retirement.

I do not really think about age. I am just sort of trying to get as much done before I get old and can't.

To retire is to die.

I'm just trying to normalize my life and get ready for the last 20 years or whatever I've got. It's a lot to take care of.

When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.

For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.

I understand from my own work that haste makes waste. But I also understand that ... the creative spark dims, and then death puts it out. William Shakespeare, for instance, hasn’t produced a new play for 400 years. That, my friends, is a long dry spell.

I don't worry about it because we are all growing old. If I were the only one I would worry. But we're all in the same boat, and all of my friends are coming with me. We all go toward old age. How many years left we don't know. We just have to accept it.

I recently turned 60. Practically a third of my life is over.

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.

I'm turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don't have an infinite number of years left and if there's anything you want to say or represent, it's time to try it.

I work more now perhaps because I know that there is so little time left.

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

I keep trying to tell people. I said, at 40, 45, you're at that crossroads. You really are there. And it's not like you can have gain without pain, but this is it. The days are - like when I wrote this whole thing about, in the beginning of my first magazine. I said, "If you live to be 75 years old, that's 3,900 weekends. That's it."

God knows what happens to your time once you have begun to get old. You are busy all the time, you do important things, you work, and yet when you sum it all up the result is nothing.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

Old age is rather like another country. You will enjoy it more if you have prepared yourself before you go.

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth.

Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them.

To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.