Senile Quotes

• When I was young I was called a rugged individualist. When I was in my fifties I was considered eccentric. Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then and I'm labeled senile.

  George Burns

  Funny, Here I Am, Age

  "Just You and Me Kid", 1979.

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• My grandfather said, "When you become senile, you won't know it."

  Bill Cosby

  Hypocrisy, Getting Older, Age

  "Bill Cosby: 49". Documentary, Comedy, www.imdb.com. 1987.

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• Your wrinkles either show that you're nasty, cranky, and senile, or that you're always smiling.

  Carlos Santana

  Funny, Smile, Wrinkles

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• Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

  Henry Adams

  Passion, Men, Young

  Henry Adams (2015). “The Education of Henry Adams”, p.166, Booklassic

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• He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.

  Robertson Davies

  Autumn, Editors, Fudge

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• All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

  Tennessee Williams

  God, Atheism, Mythology

  Tennessee Williams (2009). “The Night of the Iguana”, p.58, New Directions Publishing

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• I attended a very small junior high and specially in the end that became a disaster. The principal was pretty senile and a drunk, so the children more or less runned the school.

  Jonathan Brandis

  Children, School, Drunk

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• Develop your eccentricities early, and no one will think you're going senile later in life

  David Ogilvy

  Thinking, Later In Life, Eccentricity

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• The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine, and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoidal peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines.

  John T. Flynn

  Peace, Moving, Destiny

  John T. Flynn (1944). “As We Go Marching”

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• There is not a man who does not get senile by the time he reaches sixty. And when one thinks that he will not be senile, he is already so.

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo

  War, Men, Thinking

  Yamamoto Tsunetomo, William Scott Wilson (2002). “Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai”, p.54, Kodansha International

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• The plague of government is senile delinquency.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Government, Delinquency, Plague

  "The Complete Neurotic's Notebook". Book by Mignon McLaughlin, 1981.

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• When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Perhaps the adjective 'elderly' requires definition. In physics, mathematics, and astronautics it means over thirty; in the other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory!

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Mean, College, Elderly

  Profiles of the Future ch. 2 (1962).

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• I just want to retire before I go senile because if I don't retire before I go senile, then I'll do more damage than good at that point.

  Elon Musk

  Inspirational, Want, Damage

  "Master Of Creative Disruption". Interview with Logan Ward, www.popularmechanics.co.za. December 1, 2012.

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• As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

  Stephen King

  Basketball, Optimistic, Player

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• Don't ever get old. With each year that passes, the old Viking idea of jumping off a cliff to one's death looks better and better. The only thing to hope for is that you get so senile that you think you're twenty years old again. That would be fun to relive.

  Camilla Lackberg

  Fun, Thinking, Jumping

  Camilla Lackberg (2012). “Camilla Lackberg Crime Thrillers 1-3: The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter”, p.117, HarperCollins UK

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• What the object of senile avarice may be I cannot conceive. For can there be anything more absurd than to seek more journey money, the less there remains of the journey?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Journey, May, Absurd

  Marcus Tullius Cicero (2014). “Delphi Complete Works of Cicero (Illustrated)”, p.3016, Delphi Classics

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• It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, beautiful or ugly - those were mere unimportant variations. Behind each woman rises the austere, sacred and mysterious face of Aphrodite.

  Nikos Kazantzakis

  Beautiful, Female, Variation

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• Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.

  Paul Gauguin

  Done, World, Littles

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• Anti-theses.- The most senile thing ever thought about man is contained in the celebrated saying 'the ego is always hateful'; the most childish is the even more celebrated 'love thy neighbor as thyself'. - In the former, knowledge of human nature has ceased, in the latter it has not yet even begun.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Ego, Hateful

  Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale (1996). “Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.296, Cambridge University Press

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• I'm plotting revolution against this lie that the majority has a monopoly of the truth. What are these truths that always bring the majority rallying round? Truths so elderly they are practically senile. And when a truth is as old as that, gentlemen, you can hardly tell it from a lie.

  Henrik Ibsen

  Lying, Elderly, Gentleman

  Henrik Ibsen (1960). “The Oxford Ibsen: An enemy of the people. The wild duck. Rosmersholm”

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• At twenty, a man feels awfully aged and blasé; at thirty, almost senile; at forty, "not so old"; and at fifty, positively skittish.

  Helen Rowland

  Men, Twenties, Fifty

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• But a haiku by Buson came into his mind: 'I try to forget this senile love; a chilly autumn shower.' The gloom only grew denser.

  Yasunari Kawabata

  Autumn, Mind, Trying

  Yasunari Kawabata (2013). “The Sound of the Mountain”, p.210, Vintage

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• Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter - which is the door of death - but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.

  Catherynne M. Valente

  Wise, Autumn, Winter

  Catherynne M. Valente (2011). “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making”, p.141, Macmillan

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• I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

  John Berryman

  Cancer, Thinking, Faces

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• Things are much more complicated. Feminism versus pornography, for example. There are a lot of feminists who think it is bad, but others think it's good.
  I have become, you might call it mature - I would call it senile - and I can see both sides. But you can't write a satirical song with 'but on the other hand' in it, or 'however'. It's got to be one-sided.

  Tom Lehrer

  Song, Writing, Thinking

  Sydney Morning Herald interview, www.smh.com.au. March 1, 2003.

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