Some thoughts on aging.

Age is opportunity no less,

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away,

The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus.

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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.

~T.S. Eliot, quoted in Time, 23 October 1950.

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I fear vastly more a futile, incompetent old age than I do any form of death.

~William Allen White

* * *

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man.

~Leon Trotsky (Lev Davidovich Bronstein), Diary in Exile, 1935.

* * *

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.

~Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1711.

* * *

There must be a day or two in a man's life when he is the precise age for something important. ~Franklin P. Ada

* * *

Middle age is youth without its levity, and age without decay.

~Daniel Defoe