Retirement is full of new activities, experiences, and anticipations! And it may mean something different for everyone.
So, if you’re planning a retirement party of giving a retirement gift or retirement card with a special message, we have dozens of quotes of all kinds.
How about… happiness, success, experience, aging, imagination, change, humor, health … and lots more. You can use these for meaningful or humorous retirement advice, or something uplifting for elderly issues loved ones may be experiencing.
We’ve assembled a nice collection of retirement message quotes, as well as for inspirational, birthday, anniversary. They’ll be especially great for making your own greeting cards, posters, flyers, or to use with special artwork and gifts. Perhaps you may want to include something personal and extra in a card you already have.
Or if you need a retirement message for a speech or party, look at this variety. (And you might like to check out our page on Get Fun Elderly Activities — you can have a party theme within a party!)
You will see many famous people represented, and some you may not know, in this page of fun quotes and retirement message ideas. So, use your own imagination to put them to use! We have also mentioned a few important books that the elderly can read. You can find them below the quotes in each category.
Retirement Message Categories
Retirement & Work – Retirement Message or Quote
Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them. – Louis Armstrong
Planning to retire? Before you do find your hidden passion, do the thing that you have always wanted to do. – Catherine Pulsifer
Retirement means no pressure, no stress, no heartache… unless you play golf. – Gene Perret
If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves. – Lane Kirkland
People forget how fast you did a job – but they remember how well you did it. – Howard Newton
A retired husband is often a wife’s full-time job. – Ella Harris
Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five, I still had pimples. – George Burns
There are an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job. – Peter Drucker
People may live as much as retired from the world as they like, but sooner or later they find themselves debtor or creditor to someone. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking. – Gail Sheehy
The trouble with retirement is that you never get a day off. – Abe Lemons
Work is love made visible. – Kahlil Gibran
Retirement kills more people than hard work ever did. – Malcolm Forbes
If I choose to devote myself to certain labors which yield more real profit, though with little money, they may be inclined to look at me as an idler. – Henry David Thoreau
Success & Experience – Retirement Message or Quote
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. – Dale Carnegie
How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten? – Logan P. Smith
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it. – C. Fields
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it. – Jonathan Winters
Success has a simple formula: do your best, and people may like it. – Sam Ewing
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the brick’s others have thrown at him. – David Brinkley
Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. – Paul Getty
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. – Niels Bohr, physicist
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. = Aldous Huxley
Enjoyment & Happiness – Retirement Message or Quote
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another. – Anatole France
We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it. – Frank Howard Clark
For in the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. – Kahlil Gibran
Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. – Benjamin Disraeli
An optimist is the human personification of spring. – Susan J. Bissonette
Health – Retirement Message or Quote
So many people spend their health gaining wealth, and then must spend their wealth to regain their health. – A.J. Reb Materi
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not. – Mark Twain
Eat a few suppers, and you’ll need a few medicines. – Ben Franklin
The greatest wealth is health. – Virgil
Aging – Retirement Message or Quote
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion. – Doris Lessing
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. – Kurt Vonnegut
I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates. – S. Eliot
Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form. – Andre Maurois
Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end. – Marcus Tullius Cicero
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. – Lewis Carroll
Grandmas are moms with lots of frosting. – Author Unknown
It takes a long time to become young. – Pablo Picasso
I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap. – Bob Hope
How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? – Satchel Paige
Like many women my age, I am 28 years old. – Mary Schmich
Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as a spectator. – Confucius
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been. – Madeleine L’Engle
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. – Mark Twain
Attitude & Character – Retirement Message or Quote
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. – James Branch Cabell
What you are will show in what you do. – Thomas Edison
Men show their characters in nothing more clearly than in what they think laughable. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. – Lois McMaster Bujold
A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. – Abraham Lincoln
I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that. – Lauren Bacall
The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships. – Abraham Lincoln
Education is the progressive discovery of our ignorance. – Will Durant
Life is too short to do anything for oneself that one can pay others to do for one. – Somerset Maugham
Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. – Henry Ford
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler. – Albert Einstein
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. – William Ralph Inge
Money & Wealth – Retirement Message or Quote
I’m living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart. – e e cummings
There are people who have money and people who are rich. – Coco Chanel
It’s better to live rich than to die rich. – Henry David Thoreau
We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. – Gloria Steinem
Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair. – Sam Ewing
That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. – Henry David Thoreau
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. – Mark Twain
Our true wealth is the good we do in this world. None of us has faith unless we desire for our neighbors what we desire for ourselves. – Mohammed
The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you lost all your money. – Author Unknown
Change & Opportunity – Retirement Message or Quote
When you’re finished changing, you’re finished. – Benjamin Franklin
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. – Helen Keller
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. – James F. Byrnes
They always say time changes things, but you must change them yourself. – Andy Warhol
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. – Nelson Mandela
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable. – Helen Keller
A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache. – Catherine the Great
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. – Anatole France
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door. – Emily Dickinson
Opportunity dances with those who are ready on the dance floor. – Jackson Brown, Jr.
Life is not anything, but an opportunity for something. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents. – Eric Hoffer
Imagination & Thinking – Retirement Message or Quote
Imagination is more important than Knowledge. – Albert Einstein
To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all. – Anatole France
Imagination rules the world. – Napoleon Bonaparte
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. – Henry David Thoreau
If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise. – Robert Fritz
All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers. – Orison Swett Marden
The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high, and we miss it, but that it is too low, and we reach it. – Michelangelo
Change your thoughts and you change your world. – Norman Vincent Peale
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say, “Why not?” – George Bernard Shaw
The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want. – Ben Stein
Trust that little voice in your head that says “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…”; And then do it. – Duane Michals
Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
…yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow are today’s dream. – Kahlil Gibran
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. – Michelangelo
If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. – George S. Patton
Nomadland is an imaginative book that takes the creative aspect to give readers a unique image of how to survive America. The book has been so famous that it is soon expected to be turned into a film as well. This one book is completely scorching, beautifully written, vivid, and disturbing at the same time.
The book takes the tale of the dark side of the American Economy, a perfect read for those that have retired. It also celebrates the excellence of those Americans that have kept their hopes high in dark circumstances. Go ahead and read it, you will surely enjoy it.
Be sure to share a quote or retirement message with friends and family. They have many uses for many occasions! Besides our retirement message page, we have many more retirement ideas. Including all about finding a hobby.