Walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on 5

Retirement Stats, Studies, and Stuff

By Mariella Vigneux, MBA, ACC
Certified Professional Coach

To spark up your day, here is a sampling of perspectives on retirement.  They come from a host of eloquent people, advising us to walk sober off, to enrage those who pay our annuities; to insist on more than a succession of ordinary days; to toil; to build inner character; and to recognize a graceful exit when we see one.

 Quotations to Spark Up Your Day

1. Our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

~ William Shakespeare

2. A person can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

3. I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

~ George Bernard Shaw

4. The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

~Vince Lombardi

5. As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

~ Anthony Trollop

6. I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.

~ Voltaire

7. Learn to live well, or fairly make your will; you played, and loved, and ate, and drunk your fill: walk sober off; before a sprightlier age comes tittering on, and shoves you from the stage: leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.

~ Alexander Pope

8. I will not retire while I’ve still got my legs and my makeup box.

~Bette Davis

9. Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.

~Malcolm Muggeridge

10. Fear no more the heat o the sun, nor the furious winter’s rages. Thou thy worldly task hast done, home art gone and taken thy wages.

~William Shakespeare

11. Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

 ~Samuel Johnson

12. ….tis our fast intent / To shake all cares and business from our age, / Conferring them on younger strengths, while we / Unburden’d crawl toward death.

~ William Shakespeare

13. It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues…. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

 ~ David Brooks

14. For retirement brings repose, and repose allows a kindly judgment of all things

~ John Sharp Williams