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The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.
--
Letter to Queen Mother Elisabeth of Belgium (12 January 1953), Einstein Archive 32-405. Quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Banesh Hoffman (1973), p. 261, and also partially quoted (with a reference to the exact date of the letter) in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson (2007), p. 536.

 

Albert Einstein

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There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is — and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

 

Henri Barbusse

 

William Rehnquist—I hope you die a slow and painful death. Sandra Day O'Connor—die a slow and painful death. Clarence Thomas—I hope you die slowly and painfully. Antonin Scalia—die with pain, slowly. Justice Kennedy—I forget your first name—I hope your death is painful and slow. President Bush—I hope you die so slowly, and with pain. Dick Cheney—die painfully slow, with slow pain. John Ashcroft—die slowly, painfully. You are all criminals. You will never go to jail. So just die, as soon as possible, with great pain, slowly. I would die the slowest, most painful death of all of you if it meant that just half of you would die now. Call me liberal, call me twisted and sick, I don't care. I hate you all and I hope you all die.

 

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Live. Breathe. It is not fear that we need to live by, but joy, hope. Inside you, in your ocean, maybe it seems barren; maybe it feels as if there is no hope, no kindness, no reason for happiness. But deep within you, undeniably, something rumbles, cries out, wants to be born. Allow the joy to come forward. Allow the hope to exist.

 

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I'm growing fonder of my staff;
I'm growing dimmer in the eyes;
I'm growing fainter in my laugh;
I'm growing deeper in my sighs;
I'm growing careless of my dress;
I'm growing frugal of my gold;
I'm growing wise; I'm growing — yes, —
I'm growing old!

 

John Godfrey Saxe

 

I cannot help thinking that historians, looking back from the far future, will record this age as the Third Renaissance. We who are lost in it, working or looking on, can neither tell what we are doing, nor where standing; but we cannot help observing, that, just as in the Greek Renaissance, worn-out Pagan orthodoxy was penetrated by new philosophy; just as in the Italian Renaissance, Pagan philosophy, reasserting itself, fertilised again an already too inbred Christian creed; so now Orthodoxy fertilised by Science is producing a fresh and fuller conception of life — a love of Perfection, not for hope of reward, not for fear of punishment, but for Perfection's sake. Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, is forming that new philosophy, and it is in times of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence always a discovery, must flourish. Those whose sacred suns and moons are ever in the past, tell us that our Art is going to the dogs; and it is, indeed, true that we are in confusion! The waters are broken, and every nerve and sinew of the artist is strained to discover his own safety. It is an age of stir and change, a season of new wine and old bottles. Yet, assuredly, in spite of breakages and waste, a wine worth the drinking is all the time being made.

 

John Galsworthy