Mark Twain Age Quotations

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolish

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.

We have no permanent brains until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up -- and that is one of the main things.

(Twain on Cain): it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea

The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little

In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.

When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

You cant reach old age by another man's road, my habits protect my life but they would assassinate you

Seventy is old enough. After that there is too much risk.

How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!

It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on.

Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge.

I am aware that I am very old now; but I am also aware that I have never been so young as I am now, in spirit, since I was fourteen and entertained Jim Wolf with the wasps. I am only able to perceive that I am old by a mental process; I am altogether unable to feel old in spirit. It is a pity, too, for my lapses from gravity must surely often be a reproach to me. When I am in the company of very young people I always feel that I am one of them, and they probably privately resent it.

If I had been helping the Almighty when he created man, I would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning!

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

As soon as a man recognizes that he has drifted into age, he gets reminiscent. He wants to talk and talk; and not about the present or the future, but about his old times. For there is where the pathos of his life lies - and the charm of it. The pathos of it is there because it was opulent with treasures that are gone, and the charm of it is in casting them up from the musty ledgers and remembering how rich and gracious they were.

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

I'm pushing 60 years of age...and that's enough exercise for me.

In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

Life should begin with age and it's privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and it's capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

We can't reach old age by another man's road.

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

Politicians, old buildings, and prostitutes become respectable with age.