Middle Age Quotes

I believe that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, possibly even in our lifetime, and that a majority of us (if prepared) will muddle through to a freer, more open, less crowded, green and spacious agrarian society. (Maybe; of course it may be only a repeat of the middle ages.)
- Edward Abbey

Middle age occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.
- Scott Adams

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.
- Horatio Alger

In Venice in the Middle Ages there was once a profession for a man called a codega--a fellow you hired to walk in front of you at night with a lit lantern, showing you the way, scaring off thieves and demons, bringing you confidence and protection through the dark streets.
- Elizabeth Gilbert

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages
- Kingsley Amis

In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.
- Hans Christian Anderson

Middle -age is the time of life, that a man first notices - in his wife.
- Richard Armour

All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.
- Diana Athill

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

Younger players in this music often turn out to be middle aged; it is not a young music.
- Derek Bailey

I guess they didn't have those in the Middle Ages, did they? (Taryn)
Middle Ages? Lady, you use very strange words. (Sparhawk)
Yeah, okay, let me not tarry. I shall dress forthwith and hasten myself back to thee or thou or whatever it is. (Taryn)
She's a strange demoiselle, but a highly amusing one. (Sparhawk)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon

He was miles past middle age with a gut that housed ample good meals. A patch of silver hair formed a trail from his forehead to the crown of his head where it dead ended with male pattern baldness. A sea of family photos took up residence on his desk. He sat back in a high-back leather swivel chair. Steepled hands. Robert Last Boots in Cognac Cordovan. Blue collar city worker with prestigious white collar dreams.
- Brandi L Bates

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

Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly.
- Candice Bergen

Self-acceptance has been a blessed by-product of middle age.
- Candice Bergen

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
- Alain De Botton

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.
- Anne Bradstreet

Middle age snuffs out more talent than ever wars or sudden deaths do.
- Richard Hughes

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.
- Anne Tyler

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times.
- James Buchan

Any attempts at autobiography before the age of eighty seem pretty self-involved to me. There are a lot of smart middle aged people but not many wise ones.
- Jimmy Buffett

The worst thing about this particular end (of my youth) and the beginning (of middle age) is that for the first time in my life, I realize I don't know where I'm going. My wants are simple: a job that I like and a guy whom I love. And on the eve of my thirteth, I must face that I am 0 for 2.
- Emily Giffin

But if you cannot at once laugh at a thing or believe in it, you have no business in the Middle Ages. Or in the world for that matter.
- Gilbert K Chesterton

In the absence of evidence, superstition. It's a Middle Ages thing. That's my theory anyway.
- Tucker Carlson

Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
- Lillian Gordy Carter

Middle age is when your old classmates are so grey and wrinkled and bald they don't recognize you.
- Bennett Cerf

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.
- Dan Chaon

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
- Dwight D Eisenhower

Middle age: when you begin to exchange your emotions for symptoms.
- Irvin S Cobb

Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.
- Harold Coffin

Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth.
- Mason Cooley

Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.
- Mason Cooley

Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places.
- E Joseph Cossman

I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There's no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks--of sweat and smoke and sewage.
- Marianne Curley

Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age.
- William Feather

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
- William Feather

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
- Kurt Vonnegut

The really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you'll grow out of it.
- Doris Day

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.
- Doris Day

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
- Umberto Eco

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
- Umberto Eco

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.
- George Orwell

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.
- Jerome K Jerome

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
- Don Marquis

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.
- Don Marquis

I like to be alone so I can write. But focus can hurt you. I don't want to be some stress casualty in early middle age.
- James Ellroy

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest the laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that.So the next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come.
- Richard P Feynman

I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend. I thought I could live with itI thought, yes and I admit it, that I would be different. That at the very least, middle age and children would slow him down; however, they seemed to accelerate his pace.
- Suzanne Finnamore

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it.
- Gustave Flaubert

Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.
- Dario Fo

The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It's either that or your weight. In any case, if you don't do something, you could be dead by August.
God, middle age is an unending insult.
- Dorothea Benton Frank

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.
- Sigmund Freud

The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.
- Stephen Gardiner

Well, He had known what love was-a sharp pang, a fierce experience, in the midst of whose flames he was struggling! but, through that furnace he would fight his way out into the serenity of middle age,-all the richer and more human for having known this great passion.
- Elizabeth Gaskell

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
- Andre Gide

Middle age has been defined as what happens when a person's broad mind and narrow waist change places.
- A C Grayling

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.
- Sylvia Plath

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.
- Tom Robbins

For three hundred years we have had our focus on the individual. We have distinguished him from the objective world as the Middle Ages did not think of doing. We have given him the world and the universe as a playground for exploration and discovery.
- John Grierson

Too much thought is bad for the soul, for art, and for crime. It is also a sign of middle age.
- Patrick Hamilton

Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism.
Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
- Sam Harris

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, "Why not?" and the other, "Why bother?"
- Sydney J Harris

We in middle age require adventure.
- Carolyn Gold Heilbrun

But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.
- Charlie Higson

Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.
- Adolf Hitler

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.
- Bob Hope

The first door in the hall leads to youth, the second door leads to middle age, and the third door leads to the bathroom. But knock first, because I think grandpa's in there.
- Jarod Kintz

When I think of the Middle Ages I think of castles, Catholicism, and taking your kids to soccer practice.
- Jarod Kintz

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

I love the French and Italian church paintings from the Middle Ages. But I'm also interested to learn more about who was the first to make the leap from religious art to secular. That couldn't have been a small feat. Who was brave enough to say, You know what? Enough of Jesus. I'mma paint me this here bowl of fruit and then I'mma paint my girlfriend... naked!
- Jen Lancaster

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.
- Doris Lessing

Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century.
- C S Lewis

... in the youth of middle age--square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile--..
- A J Liebling

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.
- David Lodge

A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument for tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective.' (1923)
- John Gresham Machen

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
- Andre Maurois

I'm not trying to be a middle aged centerfold, I just want to look at myself naked and not be disgusted.
- Terry Mcmillan

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
- Margaret Mead

What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.
- Rohinton Mistry

It's like suddenly in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge of women's bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else
- Inga Muscio

Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
- Ogden Nash

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
- Ogden Nash

People gave you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this was the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could. Marika was beckoning from the other side.
- Heather O Neill

People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, "If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it." They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.
- Heather O Neill

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Patience makes a women beautiful in middle age.
- Elliot Paul

If you're middle aged... where're you going to go to meet someone? You're not going to go to a bar, you're not going to go to a night club; and there are the museums.
- Elizabeth Perkins

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
- J M Roberts

There are three periods in life: youth, middle age and "how well you look".
- Nelson Rockefeller

If the onset of wrinkles in middle age were referred to as laughter lines, then to look at him, Scott thought, Twinkle's life must have been hilarious. He had sharp eyes that often seemed to visually contradict the lack of intelligence that could be derived from listening to him talk. There might not be a lot to respect in Twinkle, but Scott liked him. He just didn't want to end up like him.
- R D Ronald

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
- Robert Runcie

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.
- Richard Russo

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
- George Santayana

Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.
- Pierre Schaeffer

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.
- Max Scheler

It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.
- Jack Schwartz

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.
- David Sedaris

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.
- Gail Sheehy

Various Turkish people invaded southwest Asia during the Middle Ages and carved an empire for themselves from lands occupied by the indigenous Semitic and Indo-European inhabitants.
- John Shimkus

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.
- Goldwin Smith

There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages.
- Goldwin Smith

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.
- Goldwin Smith

If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication.
- Goldwin Smith

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.
- Goldwin Smith

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.
- Stephen Spender

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.
- Art Spiegelman

Modern as the style of Pascal's writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.
- Lytton Strachey

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.
- Lytton Strachey

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.
- Calvin Trillin

Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve. Middle age is when you're forced to.
- Bill Vaughan

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.
- Gore Vidal

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
- Orson Welles

Last fight I had with the bitch ended way too soon."
Eddie rolled his eyes and glanced at Jim. "It was in the Middle Ages and he still hasn't gotten over it.
- J R Ward

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?
- H G Wells

There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.
- Jessamyn West

The three ages of man: youth, middle age and 'my word you do look well'.
- June Whitfield

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.
- A N Wilson

Middle Age - later than you think and sooner than you expect.
- Earl Wilson

It flourished with the Saracens, and suffered in the obscure and fanatical days of the Middle Ages.
- Isaac Mayer Wise

Had the Hebrews not been disturbed in their progress a thousand and more years ago, they would have solved all the great problems of civilization which are being solved now under all the difficulties imposed by the spirit of the Middle Ages.
- Isaac Mayer Wise

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.
- Anzia Yezierska