Old Men Quotes

In dark ages, people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide, he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides.
- Heinrich Heine

Indeed you did your best...I hope that it may be long before you find yourself in such a tight corner again between two such terrible old men.

- J R R Tolkien

It is good even for old men to learn wisdom.
- Aeschylus

It is always in season for old men to learn.
- Aeschylus

If Socrates leaves his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend.' Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.
- James Joyce

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
- James Joyce

For a time in my life I stood looking at the wind, I forgot to sow, I did not live joyfully, I did not even drink the wine offered me. But, one day, I judged myself ready, and I went back to work, I told men about my visions of paradise, as did Bosch, Van Gogh, Wagner, Beethoven, Einstein, and other madmen before me.
- Paulo Coelho

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
- Ernest Hemingway

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
- Ernest Hemingway

If you have read many adventure novels, you'll know that spies spend about half of their time in the sewers. They run along sewer tunnels, shooting. They find secret hideaways in sewers. They take weird funeral barges through sewers, poled along by old men in hoods. In fact, if a spy's kid wants to get a message to their mom or dad, the easiest way to do it is just to flush it down the toilet.
- M T Anderson

Chorus of old men: How true the saying: 'Tis impossible to live with the baggages, impossible to live without 'em.
- Aristophanes

Chorus of old men: If we give them the least hold over us, 'tis all up! their audacity will know no bounds! We shall see them building ships, and fighting sea-fights like Artemisia; nay if they want to mount and ride as cavalry, we had best cashier the knights, for indeed women excel in riding, and have a fine, firm seat for the gallop. Just think of all those squadrons of Amazons Micon has painted for us engaged in hand-to-hand combat with men.
- Aristophanes

Old men tend to forget what thought was like in their youth; they forget the quickness of the mental jump, the daring of the youthful intuition, the agility of the fresh insight. They become accustomed to the more plodding varieties of reason, and because this is more than made up by the accumulation of experience, old men think themselves wiser than the young.
- Isaac Asimov

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
- Francis Bacon

Young men, hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young.
- Augustus

Old women are more reconciled to death than old men. By bringing life to the world, we come to see ourselves as debtors. What's given is taken.
- R Scott Bakker

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
- Oscar Wilde

What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
- Oscar Wilde

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
- Oscar Wilde

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
- Brendan Behan

The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.
- Ezra Taft Benson

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in....The world would mold men by changing their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ would change human nature.
- Ezra Taft Benson

There are only three kinds of Irishmen who can't understand women. Young men, old men and men of middle age.
- Elizabeth Berg

The old world told men merely about to live and to die.
Today men think about defeating death and resurrection.
- Toba Beta

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!
- William Shakespeare

You're a mean old man, Your Grace."
"And that is the way it should be." Roial informed. "Mean young men are trivial, and kindly old men boring. Here, let me get us something to drink.
- Brandon Sanderson

Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
- Anita Brookner

Perceptions of the modern masons ranged from their being a group of harmless old men who liked to play dress-up... all the way to an underground cabal of power brokers who ran the world. the truth, no doubt, was somewhere in the middle.
- Dan Brown

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
- George Bernard Shaw

I would certainly end up forever crying the blues into a
coffee cup in a park for old men playing
chess or silly games of some sort.
- Charles Bukowski

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
- Truman Capote

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.
- Orson Scott Card

Let us live and love, nor give a damn what sour old men say.
The sun that sets may rise again, but when our light has sunk into the earth it is gone forever.
- Catullus

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
- George Chapman

But they wrote like little old men and little old ladies, all purseymouthed and ooo, don't slip on that icy patch, Mildred.
- Stephen King

It's incredibly unfair. You don't see a lot of 60-year-old women with 20-year-old men onscreen.
- George Clooney

Birds are and always have been reincarnated old men with Tourette's syndrome having somehow managed to dupe the reproductive saga. They fuck each other and tend to their home repairs and children while never missing their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don't speak bird.
- Kurt Cobain

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins."
"I'm going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.
- J M Coetzee

Young men preen. Old men scheme.
- Mason Cooley

What i'm trying to tell you," Min said, "is that im going to grow up to be one of those chubby old ladies. It's in my genes. Like self raising flour. i'm going to pouf."
"thats going to work out well for me," Cal said. "because i'm going to grow up to be one of those horny old men who chases chubby old ladies around the couch.
- Jennifer Crusie

The heavy work requiring muscle and the skilled work with crops and sheep was done by Ged, Shandy, and Tenar, while the two old men who had been there all their lives, his father's men took him about and told him how they managed it all, and truly believed they were managing it all, and shared their believe with him.
- Ursula K Le Guin

You know when you're young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they're trying to be old men and they have no idea what that's like? It's just that stupid the other way around.
- Clint Eastwood

In spite of all the dishonour,
the broken standards, the broken lives,
The broken faith in one place or another,
There was something left that was more than the tales
Of old men on winter evenings.
- T S Eliot

He was in blue jeans and a work shirt, which is another weird quirk of Rich Old Men. Just one of the guys here. Blue jeans and a work shirt, salt of the earth, working man like yourself. Like they're somehow uncomfortable about being rich enough to sleep in a bed made of vaginas being pulled around the town at night by a fleet of gold-covered midgets.
- Warren Ellis

With Ice Cube they ain't no telling. He might have one cocked and loaded, ready to bust. We might do The Sunday, two old men sitting around the house waiting on the social security check.
- Mike Epps

Old men need applause too.
- Don Everly

Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.
- Ian Fleming

Doing nothing is happiness for children and misery for old men.
- Victor Hugo

A lot of 18-year-olds are like old men. They think they've seen everything.
- Ben Folds

But I won't bore you any longer on the subject of old men. It won't make things any better and all my plans of revenge (such as disconnecting the lamp, shutting the door, hiding his clothes) must be abandoned in order to keep the peace. Oh, I'm becoming so sensible!..
- Anne Frank

She was at the age when she looked as much like an overgrown boy as a girl. And on that subject why was it that the smartest people mostly missed that point? By nature all people are of both sexes. So that marriage and the bed is not all by any means. The proof? Real youth and old age. Because often old men's voices grow high and reedy and the take on a mincing walk. And old women sometimes grow fat and their voices get rough and deep and the grow dark little mustaches.
- Carson Mccullers

...and our footsteps rang and echoed till it sounded like the room was full of dancers, the house calling up all the people who had danced here across centuries of spring evenings, gallant girls seeing gallant boys off to war, old men and women straight-backed while outside their world disintegrated and the new one battered at their doors, all of them bruised and all of them laughing, welcoming us into their long lineage.
- Tana French

The Iron Throne is mine by rights. All those who deny that are my foes."
"The whole of the realm denies it, brother," said Renley. "Old men deny it with their death rattle, and unborn children deny it in their mothers' wombs. They deny it in Dorne and they deny it on the Wall. No one wants you for their king. Sorry.
- George R R Martin

In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking of about how much rain there'd been in other towns -- Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila.
- John Grisham

Some cities are like joyful little children, they live for their summers, and other cities have personalities more like curmudgeonly old men who live for their winters, simply because it means they may wear big coats with lots of pockets to put their things in.
- Benjamin Hale

Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
- G H Hardy

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
- J K Rowling

Goddess-nurse of the young, give ear to my prayer, and grant that this woman may reject the love-embraces of youth and dote on grey-haired old men whose powers are dulled, but whose hearts still desire.
- Homer

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
- W B Yeats

Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.
- Alexander Pope

There we go again, old men and their stupid arguments. What a pain.

- Tite Kubo

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
- H P Lovecraft

Call it, friend-O (No Country For Old Men)
- Cormac Mccarthy

(Sadie)"I'm not judging you, Dylan. I love vampire movies. If I looked surprised it was only because it's so different from your TV work, that's all."
His shoulders relaxed a notch. "Sorry. Olly gives me a lot of shit for selling out. He doesn't get that no one is ever going to make his movie about two old men on a fishing trip. Or, even if they do, no one is every going to go see it.
- Sarah Mayberry

The war was about vanity, he said. It was about old men who couldn't look in the mirror anymore and so they sent the young out to die. Was was a get-together of the vain. They wanted it simple--hate your enemy, know nothing of him.
- Colum Mccann

The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men more.
- Colleen Mccullough

I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
- George Mcgovern

In the smoky firelight the two old men nodded off like a pair of ancient kings passing the aeons in their tumuli. Made a musical notation of their snores. Elgar is to be played by a bass tuba, Ayrs a bassoon.
- David Mitchell

I knew what slant of light would make you turn over. It was then I felt the highways slide out of my hands. I remembered the old men in the west side cafe, dealing dominoes like magical charms.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

Young men speak about the future because they have no past, and old men speak of the past because they have no future.
- Boyd K Packer

Old men do it better. We're not so sensitive in certain areas.
- Robert Plant

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficialI believe we are lost.
- Erich Maria Remarque

All wars are planned by old men in council rooms apart.
- Grantland Rice

I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
- Mary Roberts Rinehart

I'm just full of surprises." Watching her, he waved the wrapped bar from side to side. "You can have the candy if you sit on my lap."
That sounds like something perverted old men say to young, stupid girls."
I'm not old, and you're not stupid." He sat, patted his knee. "It's Belgian chocolate."
Just because I'm sitting on your lap and eating your candy doesn't mean you can cop a feel," she said as she folded into his lap.
- J D Robb

To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear
- Marilynne Robinson

We would have visions in those days,a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams
- Marilynne Robinson

Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them.
- R D Ronald

America is a young country with an old mentality.
- George Santayana

Stories had always been told about male genies coming out of bottles, but they were usually fat, old men. Never had the genie been a gorgeous woman, so that idea really appealed to me, and I created the series based on that premise.
- Sidney Sheldon

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.
- Henryk Sienkiewicz

Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty-year-old men feel decrepit.
- Neal Stephenson

(John Bold said): If an action is the right one, personal feelings must not be allowed to interfere. Of course I greatly like Mr Harding, but that is no reason for failing in my duty to those old men.
- Anthony Trollope

Walk the Bowery under the El at night and all you feel is a sort of cold guilt. Touched for a dime, you try to drop the coin and not touch the hand, because the hand is dirty; you try to avoid the glance, because the glance accuses. This is not so much personal menace as universal the cold menace of unresolved human suffering and poverty and the advanced stages of the disease alcoholism.
- E B White

I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.
- John Updike

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
- Theodore White

It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.
- Carter G Woodson

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
- William Butler Yeats