Your 40th birthday welcomes you into grand middle age—or as some like to think of it, the "sweet spot." This decade doesn't have the casual immaturity of youth, nor does it have the constant dependency of old age. Gone are the days when you are busy settling in your marriage or career, and you've long said goodbye to the angst-filled teenage years and the roller-coaster ride of your twenties. At forty, you have earned your place in the sun. You have carved yourself a niche and established your identity. Enjoy your fortieth turn around the sun in quiet reflection on four decades of a beautiful life, starting with these age-appropriate quotes.
Famous Quotes About Turning 40
Benjamin Franklin
"At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment."
Helen Rowland
"What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy."
Anonymous
"At the age of twenty, we don't care what the world thinks of us; at thirty, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at forty, we discover that it wasn't thinking of us at all."
Arthur Schopenhauer
"The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary."
Helen Rowland
"Life begins on your 40th birthday. But so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times."
George Bernard Shaw
"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."
Edward Young
"Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed."
French Proverb
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age."
Cicero
"This wine is forty years old. It certainly doesn't show its age."
(Latin: Hoc vinum Falernum annorum quadragenta est. Bene aetatem fert.)
Colleen McCullough
"The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men."
Maya Angelou
"When I passed forty I dropped pretense, 'cause men like women who got some sense."
Laura Randolph
"If life really begins on your 40th birthday, it's because that's when women finally get it… the guts to take back their lives."
James Thurber
"Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty eight and forty."
Samuel Beckett
"To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something."
W.B. Pitkin
"Life begins at forty."
