Historical voices

Active exercise, therefore, and temperance can preserve some part of one's former strength even in old age.

In fine, enjoy that blessing when you have it; when it is gone, don't wish it back--unless we are to think that young men should wish their childhood back, and those somewhat older their youth!

Which then of the two would you prefer to have given to you--bodily strength like that, or intellectual strength like that of Pythagoras?

Let there be only a proper husbanding of strength, and let each man proportion his efforts to his powers.

For myself, I had rather be an old man a somewhat shorter time than an old man before my time.

And yet that same failure of the bodily forces is more often brought about by the vices of youth than of old age; for a dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out state.

Shall we not allow old age even the strength to teach the young, to train and equip them for all the duties of life?

For what is more charming than old age surrounded by the enthusiasm of youth?

I am afraid an orator does lose vigour by old age, for his art is not a matter of the intellect alone, but of lungs and bodily strength.

You should use what you have, and whatever you may chance to be doing, do it with all your might.

Old men retain their intellects well enough, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed.

For of course rashness is the note of youth, prudence of old age.

The great affairs of life are not performed by physical strength, or activity, or nimbleness of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion.

Are there then no old men's employments to be after all conducted by the intellect, even when bodies are weak?

Yet it is after all true that everybody cannot be a Scipio or a Maximus, with stormings of cities, with battles by land and sea, with wars in which they themselves commanded, and with triumphs to recall.

And I used at that time to enjoy his conversation with a passionate eagerness, as though I already divined, what actually turned out to be the case, that when he died there would be no one to teach me anything.

You may be sure, my dear Scipio and Laelius, that the arms best adapted to old age are culture and the active exercise of the virtues.

For the philosopher himself could not find old age easy to bear in the depths of poverty, nor the fool feel it anything but a burden though he were a millionaire.

For old men who are reasonable and neither cross-grained nor churlish find old age tolerable enough: whereas unreason and churlishness cause uneasiness at every time of life.

The fact is that the blame for all complaints of that kind is to be charged to character, not to a particular time of life.

Wherefore, if it is your wont to admire my wisdom--and I would that it were worthy of your good opinion and of my own surname of Sapiens--it really consists in the fact that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a god, and am…

But those who look for all happiness from within can never think anything bad which nature makes inevitable.

Men, of course, who have no resources in themselves for securing a good and happy life find every age burdensome.

Virtue (without which friendship is impossible) is first; but next to it, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is Friendship.