Cicero

This ripeness is so delightful to me, that, as I approach nearer to death, I seem as it were to be sighting land, and to be coming to port at last after a long voyage.

Again, there is no fixed borderline for old age, and you are making a good and proper use of it as long as you can satisfy the call of duty and disregard death.

The result of this is, that old age is even more confident and courageous than youth.

Just as the builder of a ship or a house can break them up more easily than any one else, so the nature that knit together the human frame can also best unfasten it.

But to disregard death is a lesson which must be studied from our youth up; for unless that is learnt, no one can have a quiet mind.

For die we certainly must, and that too without being certain whether it may not be this very day.

As death, therefore, is hanging over our head every hour, how can a man ever be unshaken in soul if he fears it?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

For they are like lamps: unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from old age.

Young men are more frequently wanton and dissolute than old men; but yet, as it is not all young men that are so, but the bad set among them, even so senile folly--usually called imbecility--applies to old men of unsound character, not to…

For he kept his mind at full stretch like a bow, and never gave in to old age by growing slack.

The fact is that old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one.

For as I admire a young man who has something of the old man in him, so do I an old one who has something of a young man.

Do you suppose--to take an old man's privilege of a little self-praise--that I should have been likely to undertake such heavy labours by day and night, at home and abroad, if I had been destined to have the same limit to my glory as to my…

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.