I can't think of anything better to do with a life than to wear it out in efforts to be useful to the world.

The private decision of real-estate developers to ring a city with carefully zoned, relatively expensive suburbs exacerbates racial tensions, segregates education on the basis of color and class, modifies the urban tax base and consequently the political order, and embitters the experience of old age for those who are left behind.

Unto each man comes a day when his favorite sins all forsake him, And he complacently thinks he has forsaken his sins.

As we grow old, our sense of the value of time becomes vivid. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence.

It may be made a question whether men grow wiser as they grow older, any more than they grow stronger or healthier or honester.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have mouldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.

Our years Glide silently away. No tears, No loving orisons repair The wrinkled cheek, the whitening hair That drop forgotten to the tomb.

How good we all are, in theory, to the old; and how in fact we wish them to wander off like old dogs, die without bothering us, and bury themselves.

The misery of a child is interesting to a mother, the misery of a young man is interesting to a young woman, the misery of an old man is interesting to nobody.