“The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the grey head.”
Proverbs, c. 700 BC · Hebrew wisdom literature
Chapter 6
On What Age Gives
“Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man.”
Leviticus, c. 1200 BC · Hebrew law on how the old are to be met
“The arms best adapted to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues.”
Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman statesman and philosopher
“Old men remember everything that they care about.”
Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman statesman, answering the charge that memory fails
As the years go on, attention and memory tilt toward the positive. Older people look longer at kind faces and recall the good more readily than the bad.
Laura Carstensen, 2021 · Stanford psychologist and founder of the Center on Longevity
“All the good days behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and work for him when he sleeps.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870 · American essayist, on the accumulated credit of a life
“But the sixties have all the twenties and forties in them.”
Red Jacket, 1830 · Seneca chief, answering young warriors who boasted of their deeds
Gathering everything they knew about their participants at fifty, researchers found the best predictor of physical health thirty years later was not cholesterol. It was how satisfied people were with their close relationships.
Robert Waldinger, 2017 · director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development
In every one of the world's longest-lived communities, the oldest people are kept close and consulted, understood to be where the community stores what it knows.
Dan Buettner, 2008 · journalist who mapped the world's longest-lived communities
“When a man has said: 'I have lived!', every morning he arises he receives a bonus.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Stoic philosopher writing to his friend Lucilius
“This makes the value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870 · American essayist and lecturer
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