“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”
Psalm 90, c. 900 BC · Hebrew psalm ascribed to Moses
Chapter 1
On Growing Old
“To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and, therefore, so much less natural than the others; 'tis the last and extremest sort of dying.”
Michel de Montaigne, 1580 · French essayist who invented the personal essay
“It is the waning, not the crescent moon; The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1875 · American poet, writing at seventy
“Old men are fretful, fidgety, ill-tempered, and disagreeable. If you come to that, they are also avaricious. But these are faults of character, not of the time of life.”
Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman statesman, writing in his sixty-third year
“Just as it is not every wine, so it is not every life, that turns sour from keeping.”
Cicero, c. 44 BC · Roman statesman and philosopher
“Let us cherish and love old age; for it is full of pleasure if one knows how to use it.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Stoic philosopher writing to his friend Lucilius
“Life is most delightful when it is on the downward slope, but has not yet reached the abrupt decline.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Stoic philosopher of the Roman court
Across scores of countries, well-being traces a U through life. It dips through the middle years, bottoms out in the mid to late forties, then climbs again for decades.
David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, 2008 · economists studying well-being across the life cycle
Reviewing decades of evidence, researchers find the negative beliefs a culture holds about growing old work as an underestimated risk factor for health and length of life.
Becca Levy, 2022 · Yale epidemiologist studying beliefs about age
“Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870 · American essayist, from his chapter on old age
“How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?”
Clarence H. Wilson, 1927 · Brooklyn minister, in a sermon on the tyranny of the calendar
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.”
Robert Browning, 1864 · English poet, in the voice of a twelfth-century sage
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