INSPIRATIONAL RETIREMENT QUOTES

**  **

Retirement: That's when you return from work one day and say, "Hi, Honey, I'm home - forever."
Gene Perret

Retirement . . . is when you stop living at work and begin working at living.
Author Unknown

Retirement: When you stop lying about your age and start lying around the house.
Author Unknown

Retirement: Statutory senility.
Emmett O'Donnell

Retirement: It's nice to get out of the rat race, but you have to learn to get along with less cheese.
Gene Perret

Experience: A comb life gives you after you lose your hair.
Judith Stern

**  **

More retirement quotations to get you thinking:

Retirement itself is the best gift. No gold watch could ever top it.
Abigail Charleson

Retirement has been a discovery of beauty for me. I never had the time before to notice the beauty of my grandkids, my wife, the tree outside my very own front door. And, the beauty of time itself
Hartman Jule

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
J. Lubbock

The question isn't at what age I want to retire, it's at what income.
George Foreman

This is one of my favorite inspirational retirement quotes:

We have a lot to do ... People don't understand this. They think we're sitting around in rocking chairs, which isn't at all true. Why, we don't even own a rocking chair.
Sadie Delany, Age 103,
on her 101-year-old sister and herself

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

Life is short, but it's wide.
Spanish proverb

There are more pleasant things to do than beat up people.
Muhammad Ali (on the occasion of one of his retirements)

Musicians don't retire; they stop when there's no more music in them.
Louis Armstrong

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
Simone de Beauvoir

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.
Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.
Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A.A. Milne

Here's a favorite inspirational retirement quote from long ago:

There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle.
Samuel Butler

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
Will Rogers

When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.
R.C. Sherriff

The time for action is now. It's never too late do something.
Carl Sandburg

O, blest retirement! friend to life's decline.
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these,
A youth of labor with an age of ease!
Oliver Goldsmith

Not everyone looks forward to retirement, as these retirement quotations show:

Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.
George Burns

Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did.
Malcolm Forbes

Retirement is a one-way trip to insignificance.
George Burns

To retire is the beginning of death.
Pablo Casals

I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box.
Bette Davis

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
George Bernard Shaw

Never retire. Michelangelo was carving the Rondanini just before he died at eighty-nine. Verdi finished his opera Falstaff at eighty.
W. Gifford-Jones

I find it interesting to note that virtually every inspirational retirement quote in that group is from or about truly creative people—artists, musicians, writers. Perhaps that's the secret of ot all. Enjoy your work so much that you never want to retire from it.

Finally, here is a wonderful inspirational retirement quote from a great sage:

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.
Seneca

Back to top of Inspirational Retirement Quotes

Back to Inspirational Quotes Cafe Home page