"To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardour of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first brilliance of its faculties, or the plenitude of its strength, and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is comfort in this thought."
"To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living."
"We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age; for old age brings with it its own faults."
"It is only to the finest natures that age gives an added beauty and distinction; for the most persistent self has then worked its way to the surface, having modified the expression, and to some extent, the features, to its own likeness."
"The most beautiful existence, it seems to me, would be that of a river which should get through all its rapids and waterfalls not far from its rising, and should then in its widening course form a succession of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden comes to seek for rest."
The Love and Grace and Tenderness of Life
"Neither toil, nor the end of toil in oneself or in the world, is all vanity, in spite of the preacher; but there is enough vanity in both to make one sit loose to them. What seems to grow fairer to me as life goes by is the love and grace and tenderness of it; not its wit and cleverness and grandeur of knowledge--grand as knowledge is--but just the laughter of little children and the friendship of friends, the cosy talk by the fireside, the sight of flowers and the sound of music."
"Life is sweet, brother.... There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"