Fred Hoyle Quotes

Next to the young, I suppose the very old are the most selfish.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

Now there is this whole terror about getting old. Today, that fascination with youth is overrated. What's so special about being young? I just say that because I'm old.

I used to think 63 was old.

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.

Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net.

When you're a fledgling youth-type adult, it appears that all people in their 40s look old enough to be in a painting hanging on the wall of a stately home in England. It's not until you limp into your 70s that people in their 40s look too young to vote, and college cheerleaders closely resemble Yorkshire terriers.

To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.

After 12 years, the old butterflies came back. Well, I guess at my age you call them moths.

I have to tell you I never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago.

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age, I missed it coming and going.

It is a different world than when I was growing up, and you started to just kind of maintain at thirty-five and just hope you can hope it together. People are a lot more vital than I am and doing all kinds of things and leading really important movements.

A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.

A young man is a theory, an old man is a fact.

Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

Today's younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.

Age, what is it? It's not a figure that has ever meant anything to me.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

The three ages of man: youth, middle age and 'my word you do look well'.

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

My speaking is irregular. Sometimes quite good, sometimes not, but generally will do.... I am too far along in experience and years both for this business. I do not go into [it] with the zest of old times. Races, baseball, and politics are for the youngsters.

I was 22, and 40 was old. To be 40 again!

I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn't much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don't let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it's sad to be over 60.