Midlife Quotes

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

If you allow yourself to deepen with midlife, your experience of everything deepens, including your experience of God.

Midlife is not the time to disenchant ourselves. It's a time to turn on all our magic in full force.

Nothing bad is going to happen to us. If we get fired, it's not failure; its a midlife vocational reassessment.

I say I have a midlife crisis every time I start and finish a record.

My generation is having its midlife crisis in its 20s.

It's kind of like a midlife crisis kind of thing. When you turn 40, you have to run the marathon, while all the parts still work properly.

I had kind of a midlife crisis at twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity

People may call what happens at midlife 'a crisis,' but it's not. It's an unraveling - a time when you feel a desperate pull to live the life you want to live, not the one you're 'supposed' to live. The unraveling is a time when you are challenged by the universe to let go of who you think you are supposed to be and to embrace who you are.

Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

Ever heard of the phrase 'midlife crisis'?

You know what's funny? I don't ever feel the need to escape. I have a strong marriage. I like my life. You hear about these guys having midlife crises - I don't see that happening to me.

What do you do when the story changes in midlife? When a tale you have told yourself turns out to be a little untrue, just enough to throw the world off-kilter? It’s like leaving the train at the wrong stop: You are still you, but in a new place, there by accident or grace, and you will need your wits about you to proceed.

Much violence against women originates in emotional territory that they already command. By midlife and early old age, as the hormones of both genders change, women are in total, despotic control of their marriages.

As we reach midlife in the middle thirties or early forties, we are not prepared for the idea that time can run out on us, or for the startling truth that if we don't hurry to pursue our own definition of a meaningful existence, life can become a repetition of trivial maintenance duties.

Just as a father feels it is all ending and his children are off to start their own families, a new role begins. In midlife, Dad may experience his second "fatherhood" as a grandparent.

Let go of who you think you're supposed to be and embrace who you are.

Some people in Hollywood think of me as a model for dramatic midlife transitions: suburban housewife to Emmy-winning actress. But I never plotted out a master plan for following my dreams.

If you live your life all out today, not only is it fun, but you are preventing a midlife crisis.

I'm 51. So I'm just saying, 30 years from now you're going to have a different outlook. That's what a midlife crisis is.

I don't believe the United States is going through a midlife crisis. The United States is going through an adolescent crisis.

The midlife crisis you're having at 30 is indulgent, but the midlife crisis you have at 45 is to an extent thrust upon you.

I've been having a midlife crisis since I was four years old.

Have interesting failures.... If you need to have a personal crisis have it now. Don't wait until midlife, when it will take longer to resolve.... Don't pity yourselves. Lighten up. Seek people with a sense of humor. Avoid humorless people-and do not marry one, for God's sake.

Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, 'Is this all?' And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, 'Actually, this is pretty good.'

The Hollywood Foreign Press have just given me a time out from my 20-year midlife crisis. My heartfelt thanks to them.

Women's liberation and the male midlife crisis were the same search--for personal fulfillment, common values, mutual respect, love. But while women's liberation was thought of as promoting identity, the male midlife crisis was thought of as an identity crisis.

There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.

I think midlife crisis is just a point where people's careers have reached some plateau and they have to reflect on their personal relationships.

Havin lunch and debatin Ferrari prices. 23 and goin through a midlife crisis.

On my fortieth birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis I decided it might be more interesting to actually terrify them by going completely mad and declaring myself to be a magician.

You really must stop acting Like a 20-year-old, gold plated In a midlife crisis You just graduated Happy 60th

I tend to do something for two years then move on to something new. Yoga, then biking, then weight lifting, then back to biking. The moment it feels like a rut, I switch and search for a new love. It's like having a midlife crisis, but without the new wife or cheesy BMW.

The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.

The new midlife is where you realize that even your failures make you more beautiful and are turned spiritually into success if you became a better person because of them. You became a more humble person. You became a more merciful and compassionate person.

I found myself thinking a lot about my own spirituality. What it means to be Jewish, what it means to forgive, what it means to sacrifice, but mostly what it means to be alive, how to be a better person, how not to make the mistakes my parents had made. I guess that's what one might typically call a midlife crisis.

Hollywood actresses age in dog years. I'm 25 in the rest of the world, but I'm about 48 in actress years. I'm just around the corner from my midlife crisis.

Mindfulness is the key to everything, and this is especially true when one approaches the cultural portal known as "middle age." This is when people mindlessly believe that it's normal to get diseases and start to fall apart. But the truth is that midlife is the time when people need to wake up and be far more mindful about their everyday habits and thinking patterns.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit-the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold-is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.

Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.

Men are much simpler mechanisms than women. Nothing changes them ...even when they have a midlife crisis, they do it in a mindless way... that's why I think we should let men go off and have affairs and drive fast cars and dream of being virile - and we should run the world.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

Adam and Eve had their midlife Crisis when they realized that they were older than sin!

I'd say imagine that you wake up one morning when you're going through a midlife crisis. You're getting divorced. Your kids won't speak to you. Their faces are covered with acne, and you have to decide why you should get out of bed. That's the career you should pick. The one that keeps you going no matter what, even if your life is falling apart. That's how I feel about my career.

In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.

People who aren't addicts want to know why I became one. They ask whether I had a midlife crisis. I'm only speaking for myself now, but I've stopped asking why and how. It's all about surrender and acceptance. It doesn't matter why I am an addict.

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.