“When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
“Whoever, fleeing marriage and the sorrows that women cause, does not wish to wed comes to a deadly old age.
“Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
“A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time
“Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever