Positive Aging Quotes
Celebs and others weigh on getting the best out of later life
It ought to be a given that since we're all aging, we should view it in a positive light. Many people don't feel that way, though, and we live in a culture that cherishes youth, in all its naive glory. What if we embrace aging and turn it into the best positive of all? Being afraid of aging and even death often makes us afraid of life. How wrong is that?
Many who have aged well before us offer models we can all learn from. Here are some thoughts from some of the best minds of the past and present. They offer wise words that tell a story of how they've been able to age wisely, and how we might follow their lead.
Dispense with myths about aging and youth
Learn the lessons life is giving you
We live in a youth-obsessed culture that is constantly trying to tell us that if we are not young, and we’re not glowing, and we’re not hot, that we don’t matter. I refuse to let a system or a culture or a distorted view of reality tell me that I don’t matter. I know that only by owning who and what you are can you start to step into the fullness of life. Every year should be teaching us all something valuable. Whether you get the lesson is really up to you.
Aging is a non-stop adventure
I don't want to age gracefully, I want to age disgracefully. Aging is a cause for celebration and the reality is that it's a non-stop adventure. That's what I enjoy.
Live with courage and hope
In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage – so long are you young. When the wires are all down and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old.
Measure success by how many people love you
When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you…If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster. That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life.
Devote yourself to something bigger than yourself
Keep working
Work helps prevent one from getting old. I, for one, cannot dream of retiring… The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day I am reborn. Each day I must begin again.
Keep learning
Don’t try to be young. Just open your mind. Stay interested in stuff. There are so many things I won’t live long enough to find out about, but I’m still curious about them. You know people who are already saying, ‘I’m going to be 30—oh, what am I going to do?’ Well, use that decade! Use them all!
Keep growing
There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience. Do people with this mindset believe that anyone can be anything, that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown (and unknowable); that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training.
Keep playing
Own your smile lines!
Aging is out of your control. How you handle it, though, is in your hands.... In my older face, I see my life. Every wrinkle, every smile line, every age spot. There is a saying that with age, you look outside what you are inside. If you are someone who never smiles, your face gets saggy. If you're a person who smiles a lot, you will have more smile lines. Your wrinkles reflect the roads you have taken; they form the map of your life. My face reflects the wind and sun and rain and dust from the trips I've taken. My face carries all my memories. Why should I erase them?
Don't believe that your age means much
I just don't think of age and time in repect of years. I have too much experience of people in their seventies who are vigorous and useful, and people who are thirty-five, who are in lousy physical shape and can't think straight. I don't think age has that much to do with it.
You're not aging, you're becoming who you really are
You can always continue maturing
Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future. Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning.
You're heading toward a new birth
The whole of the life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to him [or her] self; indeed, we should be fully born when we die — although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.
