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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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