Turning forty isn’t so bad. It’s the new thirty!
Sure most of these quotes are mostly funny jabs at growing older, but some also celebrate the fact that at 40 you’re finally starting to grow up.
This is a curated sub-category. Check out our full collection of birthday quotes.
“The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary.-Arthur Schopenhauer
“At 40, I realize that I was built for comfort, not speed.-Unknown
“You’re not 40, you’re eighteen with 22 years experience-Unknown
“Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.-Edward Young
“The lovely thing about being forty is that you can appreciate twenty-five-year-old men.-Colleen McCullough
“Life begins at forty.-W.B. Pitkin
“Life begins at 40 – but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.-Helen Rowland
“Every man over forty is a scoundrel.-George Bernard Shaw
“At the age of 20, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at 40, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.-Unknown
“Women deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of twenty eight and forty.-James Thurber
“Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.-Bob Hope
“At 40, you sing along with the elevator music.-Unknown
“This wine is forty years old. It certainly doesn’t show its age.-Cicero
“Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.-Dave Barry
“Forty – the new F word: Fabulous-Unknown
“At 40, your idea of weight lifting is standing up.-Unknown
“We don’t understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it.-Jules Renard
“One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.-Dorothy Canfield Fisher
“Guys are idiots, till they’re what, 40 years old.-Wes Borland
“Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.-Eli Cass
“At 40, every time you suck in your gut, your ankles swell.-Unknown
“At 20 years of age the will reigns; at 30 the wit; at 40 the judgement.-Benjamin Franklin
“Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that’ll get you home earlier.-Dan Bennett
“When I passed forty I dropped pretense, ’cause men like women who got some sense.-Maya Angelou
“The “I just woke up” face of your 30’s is the “all day long” face of your 40’s.-Libby Reid
“Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.-Thomas Arnold
“If you’re 40 years old and you’ve never had a failure, you’ve been deprived.-Gloria Swanson
“Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.-French Proverb
“A man of forty today has nothing to worry him but falling hair, inability to button the top button, failing vision, shortness of breath, a tendency of the collar to shut off all breathing, trembling of the kidneys to whatever tune the orchestra is playing, and a general sense of giddiness when the matter of rent is brought up. Forty is Life’s Golden Age.-Robert Benchley
“Forty isn’t old… if you’re a tree.-Unknown
“What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.-Helen Rowland
