Midlife Quotes

Quotes about Midlife:

Send me your favorite Quotes!

Here's some of mine...

from Brene Brown:

"Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.

By definition, you can’t control or manage an unraveling. You can’t cure the midlife unraveling with control any more than the acquisitions, accomplishments, and alpha-parenting of our thirties cured our deep longing for permission to slow down and be imperfect.
Midlife is when the universe gently places her hands upon your shoulders, pulls you close, and whispers in your ear:

It’s time. All of this pretending and performing – these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt – has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. The time has come to let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are."

Carl Jung put it perfectly: "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life...Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."

You're never to old to be younger - Mae West

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been. ~Madeleine L'Engle

From Jean Shinoda Bolen's Crossing to Avalon
"During midlife, the desire to be real to ourselves, which comes from our soul, contributes to the crises we unconsciously create when we do not consciously acknowledge that we do not feel vital and authentic. There is an internal impetus to become a whole person and when we spend time in the metaphorical forest and the actual forest or natural world, we are exposed to the possibility of retrieval and growth of our instinctual nature, our spiritual connection with Nature and our sense of oneness with the universe." (157)

A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young; not her face.  - Billie Burke

Midlife is "when we have enough of a biography to allow us to know who we are." Carlo Strenger goes on to say, "Our potential has had enough time to express itself and is now embodied in our biography. Misconceptions and illusions we have had about ourselves give way to the accumulated evidence of who we are and how we have lived. The freedom of midlife is to fully realize the potential visible in our biography and to focus our energy on making the most of it."
Strenger, Carlo; Sosein: Active Self-Acceptance in Midlife, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 2009 49:46.