I do know middle age can bring greater depth, greater wisdom, greater capacity for love, greater capacity for relationship, greater consciousness and desire to serve and awareness of the fate of mankind – all these wonderful things, yes. And I know I’m getting there.

[On middle age:] … the very real possibility for you of growing fat as you near death and thus being seen by everyone while you are both DEAD AND FAT.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.

It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.

We three belong to the Middle Ages. We have this need of heroism, and there is no place for such feelings in modern life. That is our tragedy. Once I wanted to be a saint. It seemed the only absolute act left to do, for what is most powerful in me is the craving for purity, greatness.

Senescence begins
And middle-age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends

In middle age, I practiced feeling old, but the real thing has been a rude surprise.

Well, the first thing I had to do was to read a lot. First of all, about education… and looking at education from the Middle Ages right through to the 20th Century. The second major area was country life in the 19th Century, which I don’t know much about these days.

belated maternity has had its compensations; small children have a habit of conferring persistent youth upon their parents, and by their eager vitality postpone the unenterprising cautions and timidities of middle age.

After sixty, the self-questioning of middle age is obsolete.

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

The Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.

As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don’t hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour.

Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

Middle age is the time of life that a man first notices in his wife.

It is the fear of middle-age in the young, of old-age in the middle-aged, which is the prime cause of infidelity, that infallible rejuvenator.

Middle age is when you find out where the action is so you can go someplace else.

I do not like to see men walk away from women in late middle age.

It seems to me that since the Middle Ages (it’s not a Reformation thing), all that stuff about Jews and Gentiles coming together in Christ was just screened out.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation – yet they did. Change does happen.

Middle age went by while I was mourning for my lost youth.

The worst thing about this particular end (of my youth) and the beginning (of middle age) is that for the first time in my life, I realize I don’t know where I’m going. My wants are simple: a job that I like and a guy whom I love. And on the eve of my thirteth, I must face that I am 0 for 2.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

In childhood, death stirred me not; in middle age, it pursued me like a prowling bandit on the road; now, grown an old man, it boldly leads the way, and ushers me on.

At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.

I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.

Identifying as a Pagan, feminist, Witch, and anarchist is possibly a way to alarm great segments of the general public, but at least it keeps me from sinking into a boring and respectable middle age.

‘Simeon’s Gift‘ is really – it’s about a musician who – in the Middle Ages, who goes out to find his muse.

In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today‘s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead.

Memory is the first casualty of middle age, if I remember correctly.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There’s hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London’s texture.

When you’re a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It’s hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot.

The medieval hall house was very primitive when it became the characteristic form of dwelling of the landowner of the Middle Ages.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

I would always prefer radio or working behind the scenes where I don’t have to be seen. I don’t like how appearance oriented TV is (especially now that I’m middle aged!). But I am developing a show revolving around animal rescue which will hopefully entertain and maybe do a bit of good for the cause as well.

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

Musically, there’s a movement called the flatted fifth that’s really evil-sounding. It was outlawed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. That movement is what gives you a real evil sound that conjures up dark, fantastic images. It’s like an audio horror movie. It personifies what a horror movie is about.

When you approach middle age, lots of stuff happens. Your body is aging, you’re watching people around you get sick, you’re watching people die, your mortality becomes very present at that point in your life.

There was an ingredient used in perfumes and remedies in the Middle Ages called ‘momie’ that is certainly one of the most fascinating I’ve come across.

Litigation takes the place of sex at middle age.

I have a feeling there is no ideal situation, unless she could go back in time and be 22 again. I think some of it is just kind of the shock of realizing that you’re approaching middle age, or that you are middle-aged and kind of coming to terms with that in whatever incremental ways.

Ah, well, during the Middle Ages, religion was often able to redeem art. Today, however, art is about the only thing that can redeem religion, and the clerics will never forgive us for that.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.

Someone once said that middle age is like rereading a book that you haven‘t read since you were a callow youth. The first time around you were dazzled by impressions, emotions, and tended to miss the finer points. In middle age you have the equipment to see the subtleties you missed before and you savor it more slowly.

Morally, the world is both better and worse than it was. We are worse off than in the middle ages, or the 17th and 18th centuries, in that we have the atomic menace.

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

Life was cheap in the Middle Ages. It has become cheaper since. It is only in specific battles for specific lives that our culture is put to the test, and with it our humanity.

I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.

To the Latin, cynicism and middle age are synonymous. Look at our politicians – they move through their careers from left to center to right, like the hands of a clock.

I’m struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.

Self-acceptance has been a blessed by-product of middle age.

In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

It was stone carvers in ancient Rome, scribes in the Middle Ages, all the way through Gutenberg to the present day. That’s a pretty long track record. More likely we may reach a point where each one of us is a typographer with our own custom proprietary typeface.

I have never yet heard any middle-aged man or woman who worked with his or her brains express any regret for the passing of youth.

My mother had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself – by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never even imagined at a younger age.

Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call “Classical music” now.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it’s much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It’s the sin of my middle age, too.

When future historians look back on our way of curing inflation…they’ll probably compare it to bloodletting in the Middle Ages.

And no wonder; for the new technique of “subliminal projection,” as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

The Egyptians had the locusts and in the Middle Ages there was the Black Death with the rats, but tourists are the plague of our century and we’ll not survive this one.

Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms – because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.

We in middle age require adventure.

I did a research assignment on life in the Middle Ages only last year. I found the era fascinating, all that chivalry and court romance. But I never pictured anything as poor as this village. This is the pits. There’s no romance here, definitely no chivary. And it stinks–of sweat and smoke and sewage.

Middle age is when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.

Mankind became hysterical in the Middle Ages because it poorly repressed the sexual impressions of its Greek boyhood.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Elizabeth Peyton, the artist known for tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant youth, is now painting tiny, dazzling portraits of radiant middle age.

Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.

The term middle-aged, invented by Descartes, comes from the Latin, medeus, meaning ‘not really old’ and ageis, meaning ‘if you look at it in a certain way.

The fundamental issue, when it comes to Europe’s future, will be whether and how we manage to transfer the ideals that once made Europe great – especially its Christian roots – into today’s changed world. No one wants to return to the Middle Ages.

The purpose of the Senate is to keep 100 middle aged knuckleheads out of the private sector where they can do real harm.

At fifty you realize that you are no longer a kid. I ignored forty. It was like I was almost at middle age. Maybe it’s the baby boomer thing. But undeniably, I am a man. I have to accept [mortality].

I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.

The first indication of menopause is a broken thermostat. It’s either that or your weight. In any case, if you don’t do something, you could be dead by August. God, middle age is an unending insult.

Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

I don’t think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go – just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance – what you will find is that women’s voices are not taken seriously.

By May, 1st, 1937, there should not be one single church left within the borders of Soviet Russia, and the idea of God will have been banished from the Soviet Union as a remnant of the Middle Ages, which has been used for the purpose of oppressing the working classes.

That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity – romantic love and gunpowder.

Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world – or at least all of Europe – aspired to be Parisian.

For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life.

Middle age is when, whenever you go on holiday, you pack a sweater.

Middle age is when you go to bed at night and hope you feel better in the morning. Old age is when you go to bed at night and hope you wake up in the morning.

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

At fifteen, it [ “Follies“] didn’t have any kind of resonance with me, this show about regret and middle age.

It’s funny to see my friends going through that middle-age thing about losing their hair. I went through it in college. They all say, “Oh my God, I’m getting old. I’m never getting laid again.” Shut up. Yes, you are.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

Some eras worship infancy; some, the aged. None as yet has adored middle age.

When I was young, I used to have successes with women because I was young. Now I have successes with women because I am old. Middle age was the hardest part.

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day – respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

It’s an American thing, but it’s particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it’s still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There’s something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is – that evil is inherently banal.

The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.

I really think that people have to think safety; taking risks for higher yield is a bad idea once you’re in late or latish middle age.

Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age.

Beware of wishing for anything in youth, because you will get it in middle age.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

You know you’re getting old when work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work.

For us, when we think about the Middle Ages, it’s sort of this rarefied, distant time that we have no connection to, especially if you grew up in America.

When someone reaches middle age, people he knows begin to get put in charge of things, and knowing what he knows about the people who are being put in charge of things scares the hell out of him.

Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.

Don’t worry about middle age: you’ll outgrow it.

I’m 59 and people call me middle aged. How many 118 year old men do you know?

You and I are now nearly in middle age, and have not yet become soured and shrivelled with the wear and tear of life. Let us pray to be delivered from that condition where life and nature have no fresh, sweet sensations for us.

But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

Middle age is when it takes longer to rest than to get tired.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

Now, in my middle age,
about nineteen in the head I’d say,
I am rowing, I am rowing.

If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.

Wives are young men‘s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

Real socialism is inside man. It wasn’t born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can’t say it is finished.

We often forget that Spain controlled big parts of Europe, in Italy and the Netherlands. In the Middle Ages, Spain and Portugal were so powerful that they signed a set of treaties literally dividing up the globe between them.

Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?

Middle Age – later than you think and sooner than you expect.

I was nuts for stuff in the Middle Ages when I was just in the third and fourth grades.

I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it’s very clear that’s the era we’re in. It’s like Christianity in the Middle Ages.

Sometimes people have said that Islam, in its own calendar, is still only in the Middle Ages.

Modern as the style of Pascal‘s writing is, his thought is deeply impregnated with the spirit of the Middle Ages. He belonged, almost equally, to the future and to the past.

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

Last night was Super Tuesday – a 10-state GOP Primary orgy. A big, sweaty pile of lever-yankin Republican voters. And like most orgies, it involves a bunch of middle aged guys who are not appealing to women.

Patience makes a woman beautiful in middle age.

When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.

there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?

I’m not making films for middle aged journalists, who are mostly men. I make films that hopefully entertain people, where they can learn something about life.

There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

We should think about whether canonizations, which are an invention of the Middle Ages, still make sense today.

You know you’ve reached middle age when you’re cautioned to slow down by your doctor, instead of by the police.

In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made

God, middle age is an unending insult.

The genius of ‘Game of Thrones‘ is that in this rich imagining of a world redolent of the medieval, the rules of a Middle Ages morality play have been so thoroughly discarded.

Middle age is when the best exercise is one of discretion.

Youth is like a long weekend on Friday night. Middle age is like a long weekend on Monday afternoon.

I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young; I liked them when I was middle-age; I liked them before I was President; and I like them during President; and I like them after President.

Middle Age connotes fat, cancer, bad musical taste, and death. It conjures up a commuter in the sixties going to a Neil Simon play in Sansabelt pants, a knit vest, balding, belly sagging – and then there’s the men.

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

Middle Age, a restful, welcome break from real life, brings some unique opportunities.

In the absence of evidence, superstition. It’s a Middle Ages thing. That’s my theory anyway.

One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.

This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there’s a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it’s very much finding my own place.

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.

Middle-aged adolescents are a libel on the real thing.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

There are three periods in life: youth, middle age and “how well you look”.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they’d be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

The radical elements in Islam are very dangerous. They want to achieve a return to the Islamic purity of the Middle Ages.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Middle age is when you realize that you’ll never live long enough to try all the recipes you spent thirty years clipping out of newspapers and magazines.

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important – just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

You will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

From when you are young, through middle age, you must grow to the point that you glow, so that your light lets people feel the blessings, the virtues, and the happiness.

We reserve the term ‘genius’ for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the Middle Ages, the term ‘genius’ was reserved for people with the best memories. That is telling.

I have enormous respect for Derek Parfit, although he seems to me bound within an unfortunate philosophical tradition – rather like the extraordinarily brilliant exponents of Ptolemaic astronomy in the Middle Ages.

My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

Generals think war should be waged like the tourneys of the Middle Ages. I have no use for knights; I need revolutionaries.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Claude Debussy defined the guitar as an expressive harpsicord. I believe that is the best definition ever given of the Spanish guitar. This phrase is the starting point for my Concierto de Aranjuez Our guitar is the only survivor of the rich and anarchic instrumental wildlife of the Middle Ages.

Fear accomplishes much in love. The husband of the Middle Ages was loved by his wife for his very severity. The bride of William the Conqueror, having been beaten by him, recognized him by this token for her lord and husband

Men’s gender problems cause them a lot of suffering. There is a massive spiking suicide rate in middle age for men and a cultural attitude to male friendship that is destructive.

Middle-age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.

The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.

In middle age I’ve begun to embrace stress reducing behaviors. Just in doing yoga, for example, my health has improved dramatically.

A poet laureate of adolescent sexuality and middle-age longing.

Middle Age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, ‘Why not?’ and the other, ‘Why bother?’

That whole heroic notion of the women warriors known as Amazons is extremely appealing. It was appealing in antiquity, and, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, they’re always portrayed as heroic, courageous, and the equals of men, and that’s just extremely attractive and has been since antiquity.

Sweet is the infant‘s waking smile, And sweet the old man’s rest– But middle age by no fond wile, No soothing calm is blest.

I got booted out third, but to me [Last Comic Standing] was a lot like Rambo II…I don’t really remember much…there was rats, people bombing, screaming, yelling, and a middle aged guy with a shaved chest got beat by somebody from the Viet Cong.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year‘s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

Middle age is when anything new in the way you feel is most likely a symptom.

Some have called we rock and roll performers who never retire ‘troubadours.’ I enjoy this misnomer immensely. While there are many differences between me and my distant predecessors in L’Occitane, I do believe there is a lineage that connects us of the last 70 years with those romantic singers of the High Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Spanish Jews who thrived after their conversion to Christianity.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Middle age, my boy. No memory at all.

The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them – the ‘physical book,’ a new phrase in our language – is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.

Here’s flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age.

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.

Fear comes with middle age.

Every woman dreams of love. When she is young she prays she will find it. When she is middle aged she hopes for it and when she is old she remembers it.

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

You know you’ve reached middle age when your weightlifting consists merely of standing up.

The information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did the Middle Ages.

The greatest tragedy in the history of Christianity was neither the Crusades nor the Reformation nor the Inquisition, but rather the split that opened up between theology and spirituality at the end of the Middle Ages.

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

Almost every modern literary form existed in Hebrew two thousand years ago. And, yes, it existed even during the middle ages.

In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we’re losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive.