Crabbed age and youth cannot live together: Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age.

Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

The young suffer less from their own errors than from the cautiousness of the old.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.