Tao Te Ching
Old Age
The west tends to idealize and worship youth while eastern traditions seem to have more appreciation for old age. If lucky enough to get there, we'll have more old age than we had youth so might as well look more to the east than the west on this one. We could learn an important lesson from Kangxi (1654-1722), the longest-ruling Chinese emperor: “I have enjoyed the veneration of my country and the riches of the world; there is no object I do not have, nothing I have not experienced. But now that I have reached old age, I cannot rest easy for a moment. Therefore, I regard the whole country as a worn-out sandal, and all riches as mud and sand.” from Emperor of China by Jonathan Spence
Some of the biggest temptations and pitfalls of old age revolve around giving up, "retiring," letting other people and tools take over what we can still do. The more we succumb to convenience and taking the easy ways out; the more we fear failure and stop taking chances, trying new ideas and projects—the more we kick back and relax, the more old age becomes a problem. In old age, Solon bragged about learning something new every day; when Benjamin Frankiin was 84, his memory was still sharp enough to help Thomas Jefferson figure out some obscure details on the Bay of Passamaquoddy frontiers; Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Oliver Wendell Holmes when he was 92 and was surprised to find him reading Plato. He asked why and Holmes replied, "To improve my mind, Mr. President." Mark Twain—although he published books in 3 different centuries and was one of the 19th Centuries most highly paid authors—lost so much experimenting in new ventures that he was in today's dollar $2.4 million in debt and had to file for bankruptcy in 1894. Determined to voluntarily repay his debts, at 60 years old he launched a performing tour around the world with 122 shows in 71 cities.
As Rumi advised, "Find new life even in old age."
Quotes (105)
“Having already reached the sunset of my life (being almost on the verge of departure from the world on account of old age), I wanted, before being overtaken by death, to compose a fine anthem to celebrate the fullness of happiness and so to help now those who are well-constituted. It is right to help also generations to come (for they too belong to us, though they are still unborn)”
“I grow old learning something new every day. Seek to learn constantly while you live; do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.”
“We are all born to lose life, and what is worse, girls, to lose youth. Can you believe my white hair was once black? Complaining knee-joints creak at every move. To think I danced as delicate as a deer!”
“Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection, and despair are painful. Contact with unpleasant things, not getting what one wishes is painful. In short, the five groups of grasping are painful.”
“At 15, I set my mind and heart on learning. At 30, I stood on my own. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50 I knew heaven’s decree. At 60 my ears were in accord. At 70 I followed the desires of my mind -and-heart.”
“The great mountain must crumble,
The strong beam must break,
And the wise man wither away like a plant.”
“Better to die, and sleep the never-waking sleep, than linger on and dare to live when the soul’s life is gone.”
“They will say I have no sense of what befits my age but they will be wrong. It's a happy thing to forget one's age. The gods have drawn no distinction between young and old, which should dance and which should not.”
“Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.”
“If filial piety and fraternal respect are made important principles of instruction in village schools, graying haired elders will no longer be on the roads carrying heavy loads on their backs and heads... Treat with the reverence due to old age the elders in your own family, so that the elders in the families of others shall be similarly treated.”
“Age creeps on apace, all will soon be over;
If only it could be forever as this time it was!
But man's fate is fixed;
From meetings and partings none can ever escape.”
“Once plants reach their height of development, they wither. Once people reach their peak, they grow old. Force does not prevail for long. It isn’t the Tao. What is withered and old cannot follow the Tao. And what cannot follow the Tao soon dies.”
“For already the grey locks hurry on to replace the black, and tell me I have reached the age of discretion. While it was playtime I played ; now it is over I will turn to more worthy thoughts.”
“The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death... I quit life as if it were an inn, not a home.”
“Avarice of the old... how absurd to increase one's baggage as one nears their journey's end.”
“Away with your tears, old reprobate! Have done with your grumbling! You are withering now after tasting all the joys of life. But, because you are always pining for what is not and unappreciative of the things at hand, your life has slipped away unfulfilled and unprized... To none is life given in freehold; to all only on lease.”
“In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;
But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:
Discolored sickness, anxious labor, come,
And age, and death's inexorable doom.”
“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth.”
“When young I left home and when old I returned. The children see me and ask with smiles where I came from.”
“Our lives pass from us like the wind, and why
Should wise men grieve to know that they must die?
The Judas blossom fades, the lovely face
Of light is dimmed, and darkness takes its place.”
“In the deep night, with the wind still, the sea calm;
I'll find a boat and drift away,
to spend my final years afloat,
trusting to the river and the sea.”
“Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!”
“Don't complain that you're trapped, that your cup of life is full to the brim. Find new life even in old age.”
“Those who possess the Way are like children. They come of age without growing old.”
“It is only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller, that a scroll looks beautiful.”
“Using the elders to settle affairs is certainly appropriate for all authorities, how can there be anything that is not good”
“Folly is the only thing that keeps youth at a stay and old age afar off.”
“The more sand that escapes from our life’s hourglass, the more clearly we can see through it”
“I will never be an old man. To me old age is always 15 years older than I am.”
“The old tend to object too much, consider too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and content themselves with only a modicum of success.”
“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.
”
“Though the years may creep ahead, mind itself can never age. This mind that's always just the same—Wonderful! Marvelous! When you've searched and found at last the one who never will grow old”
“Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
“I have enjoyed the veneration of my country and the riches of the world; there is no object I do not have, nothing I have not experienced. But now that I have reached old age, I cannot rest easy for a moment. Therefore, I regard the whole country as a worn-out sandal, and all riches as mud and sand.”
“The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.”
“Years following years steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away.”
“There is a fullness of time when men should go, and not occupy too long the ground to which others have the right to advance”
“So, lively brisk old fellow, don't let age get you down. White hair or not, you can still be a lover.”
“The breeze is fresh, the moon so bright—
Together
Let's dance until dawn
As a farewell to my old age.”
“When a noble life welcomes old age, it is not the decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality… imagination pictures beyond the horizon an asylum of hope—a native land of love; and nature seems silently to repeat that man is immortal.”
“We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.”
“Nevertheless, everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say, 'Today it is bad, and day by day it will get worse—until at last the worst arrives.'”
“When age chills the blood, when our pleasures are past—
For years fleet away with the wings of the dove—
The dearest remembrance will still be the last,
Our sweetest memorial the first kiss of love.”
“Respect is paid to age because old people have necessarily shown in the course of their lives whether or not they have been able to maintain their integrity. Young people have not yet been tested.”
“Old men and women foully disarrayed
Shake their gray hair in the insulting wind.
Their work and to the dust whence they arose
And frost in these performs what fire in those.”
“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”
“Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” 
“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending... Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic—the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”
“It's the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth.”
“When you get to my age, there is nothing more to look forward to. Each day brings its tribulations and each day difficulties arise.. .So I'm giving up the struggle once and for all, abandoning all hope of success.”
“Don't let your heart grow cold, and you may carry cheerfulness and love with you into the teens of your second century.”
“Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”
“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”
“Things grow old and stale, not because they are old, but because we cease to see them... Life solidifies itself in words. And finally how everything wearies them and that is old age!”
“Old age is like death in that some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.”
“The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
“while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.”
“At 20 everyone has the face that God gave them, at 40 the face that life gave them, and at 60 the face they earned.”
“This is old age, and a limitation. Yet there is so much that fills me: plants, animals, clouds, day and night, and the eternal in man.”
“But only a brief moment - one breath or two - is granted to the brave , whose wage is the long nights of the grave.”
“it's impossible to combat old age as an enemy or even to cause it any embarrassment; it is burying us like a landslide, choking us like a slow creeping gas (1939)”
“An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?”
“Like the ancient Chinese sage [Lao Tzu], I seemed to have been born a hoary, decrepit old man with snow-white beard. As the years went by the beard turned gray, then gradually blackened, then fell off, and in my old age a tender adolescent fuzz spread across my cheeks.”
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”
“Our philosophy is a function of our age of life. We pass through utopias and idealism to knowledge and limitation”
“I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually, it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.”
“In the last few years, everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.”
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
“The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round... For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less... as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.”
“the autumn of life or even the winter of old age is the time for discovery of the deepest values... Even though everyone does not become wise with age, his judgments are no longer based on self-interest, but rather on a more impartial attitude that stands above the momentary interests of the day.”
“When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”
“Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.”
“I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had.”
“When the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, it’s like an old car—there goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another and gradually the whole things drops off, and consciousness rejoins consciousness.”
“What will it matter if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person?”
“Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.”
“Youth passes – so does spring. Old age comes – so do winter’s lovely snowscapes… I’m bursting with energy, so I’ll jog or climb Mount Hua. I’m too ill to move, so I’ll enjoy my warm bed and meditate”
“the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating... Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live.”
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created.”
“The idea of ‘retirement’ is a scam deluding people into sacrificing the meaningfulness of their careers for the illusion of pleasure, of unconstrained leisure. The result of a propaganda campaign during the age of industrialization and rapid population growth to deal with unemployment, governments wanted to minimize the discontent of jobless youth by tricking older people into obscurity, pointless dependence, and abandoning one of our most basic sources of happiness—meaningful and productive work.”
“We have to liberate ourselves from the stereotypes of aging, they’re obsolete.”
“she didn't try to hide her age but let it naturally rise to the surface, accepted it for what it was, and made peace with it.”
“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
“Old age did not put an end to Goethe’s career as a lover: in 1821, when he was seventy-two, the widowed Goethe fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl he met at a spa resort, and even proposed marriage. (She sensibly declined.)... At the age of eighty-two, dying of a painful heart condition, Goethe’s last words were 'More light!'... it is Goethe’s last perfect metaphor: one final plea for illumination, from a writer who had spent all his life seeking it.”
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