Elder Wisdom Quotes

Today we live in a global village but we don’t have our global elders to guide and inspire us.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

I used to love to sit and listen to the old people talk about yesterday. There's a lot of good information there.

An old Apache storyteller reminds us

But no matter how they make you feel, you should always watch elders carefully. They were you and you will be them. You carry the seeds of your old age in you at this very moment, and they hear the echoes of their childhood each time they see you.

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

We respect our elders. There is wisdom that comes from experience, and I am not going to stop learning from wise counsel.

The Elders were closer to the Maker of All Things and should be deferred to whenever they made their will known.

As an elder I mistrust the wisdom of age.

Like children, the elders are a burden. But unlike children, they offer no hope or promise. They are a weight and an encumbrance and a mirror of our own mortality. It takes a person of great heart to see past this fact and to see the wisdom the elders have to offer, and so serve them out of gratitude for the life they have passed on to us.

The advice of elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books.

I have always listened to elders in my life.

It is out of reality that the most peculiar tale of all is born ... Some call me the Elder Granny, others - the Dryad, but my real name is Memory. It is I who sits on a tree that keeps on growing, and growing, it is I who reminisces and tells stories.

Eyes of youth have sharp sight but commonly not so deep as those of elder age.

I am an elder, and I am delighted to be an elder. I would like to exhibit [and] explore it more - what an elder could mean in this time. But, I'd like to show that elders are good for us - that they can be good for us.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.