Retirement Quote List

Add a something from the selection of quotes on retirement below, to bring some gravitas to your farewell speech.  

Or you might feel a bit uncertain about your retirement - so it is helpful to just read up on some wisdom about it from others who have been down that path.  Or, you might be looking for words of comfort for someone who is facing retirement.  Read on!

Feel free to share yours or others' quotes here.

Retirement quotes about money:

• “The challenge of retirement is how to spend time without spending money.” Author Unknown


• “Retirement is like a long vacation in Las Vegas. The goal is to enjoy it the fullest, but not so fully that you run out of money.” Jonathan Clement


• “A whole generation of Americans will retire in poverty instead of prosperity, because they simply are not preparing for retirement now.” Scott Cook


• “There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.” Ron Chernow


• “I believe in financial retirement. I don't necessarily believe in physical retirement.” Jerry Doyle


• “As in all successful ventures, the foundation of a good retirement is planning.” Earl Nightingale

Inspirational retirement quotes:

• "There are two periods in our lives when we have exceptional freedom: at college age and when we begin our retirement years. At those times, we have relatively few restrictions and obligations..." Jimmy Carter


• "With time on our hands, the least we can do is select a few things that we really like that might still be enjoyed. One approach is simply to enumerate the time and places in our lives that have been most delightful, and then to repeat them..." Jimmy Carter


• “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson


• “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Eleanor Roosevelt

Say it better or wittier, looser and ditty-er, with some silly retirement poetry!

These quotes are aging me faster than the job did - get me some funny quotes so I can at least die laughing.

Cautionary retirement quotes:

• “Have you ever been out for a late autumn walk in the closing part of the afternoon, and suddenly looked up to realize that the leaves have practically all gone? And the sun has set and the day gone before you knew it — and with that a cold wind blows across the landscape? That's retirement.” Stephen Leacock


• “When you see some people work, you wonder what they’ll do in retirement.....” Author Unknown


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


• “Don't wait for retirement to be happy and really start living. Invariably, people who try this find out that they have waited much too long.” Author Unknown


• “Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.” John Thorn


• “Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.” Dwight L. Moody

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Click for retirement speech examples.

• “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


• “Nothing is more unusual than the sight of old people who yearn for retirement: and nothing is so rare than those who have retired and do not regret it.” Charles de Saint-Evremond


• “Retirement requires the invention of a new hedonism, not a return to the hedonism of youth” Mason Cooley


• “Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.” Abigail Adams


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


• “I tell people retirement isn't what you think. You are going to sit around and waste your life, you can only golf so much. To stay young, you have to stay in the mix.” Ron Rice

• “People who refuse to rest honorably on their laurels when they reach retirement age seem very admirable to me.” Helen Hayes


• “I need to retire from retirement.” Sandra Day O'Connor


• “Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.” Herbert Asquith

Other retirement quotes:

• “I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.” Danny McGoorty, Irish Pool Player


• “I only work every couple of years. I go into retirement between films.” 
Paul Hogan


• “The great thing about show business is that there's no mandatory retirement age.” Scott Bakula

Lighten up with some retirement jokes!

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