Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

Believe me, all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.

The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say The boredom is mutual.

The young fancy that their follies are mistaken by the old for happiness. The old fancy that their gravity is mistaken by the young for wisdom.

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

In youth the life of reason is not in itself sufficient; afterwards the life of emotion, except for short periods, becomes unbearable.

Old hands soil, it seems, what they caress; but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands are made for caresses and the sheathing of love; it is a pity to make them join too soon.

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.