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Retirement quotations

50 quotes for retirement speeches

By: Susan Dugdale 

If you're looking for retirement quotations of wit, wisdom, or a combination of both, to include in a retirement or farewell speech, you should find something apt in this large and varied collection. 

Please help yourself!

Where the author is known, their name is shown below the quotation. If you choose to use their words, do acknowledge them.

Retire? I'm going to stay in show business until I'm the only one left.

- George F. Burns (American comedian 1896-1996)

Retirement: When you quit working just before your heart does.

- Anonymous

Retirement is the ugliest word in the language.

- Ernest Hemingway (American novelist and short-story writer, Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1954, 1899-1961)

A lot of our friends complain about their retirement. We tell 'em to get a life.

- Larry Laser

When a man retires, his wife gets twice the husband but only half the income.

- Chi Chi Rodriguez (Puerto Rican Golfer, b.1935)

Age is only a number, a cipher for the records. A man can't retire his experience. He must use it. Experience achieves more with less energy and time.

- Bernard Mannes Baruch

He who laughs last at the boss's jokes probably isn't far from retirement.

- Anonymous

When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.

- Gail Sheehy (American writer, b.1937)

There are some who start their retirement long before they stop working.

- Robert Half

I have never liked working. To me a job is an invasion of privacy.

- Danny McGoorty

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

- George F. Burns (American comedian 1896 - 1996)

A man is known by the company that keeps him on after retirement age.

- Anonymous

I really stay busy in retirement. I often have to cancel my golf games on the weekends to go play in tennis tournaments.

- Richard Davies

The best time to start thinking about your retirement is before the boss does.

- Anonymous

Welfare is not a retirement plan.

- Anonymous

There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job.

- Anonymous

Retirement is when the living is easy and the payments are hard.

- Anonymous

An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labor, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven!

- James Thomson, 1700-1748

A successful artist of any kind has to work so hard that she is justified in refusing to lay down her scepter until she is placed on the bier.

- Dame Edith Evans

It has become clear to most of us that we don't want "our father's retirement"; the only thing that needs to be retired is old ideas about retirement.

Our greatest fear and insecurity for our later years should not be about the Social Security system or about being broke but rather about being without purpose and meaningful work.

- Mitch Anthony

Retirement is wonderful. It's doing nothing without worrying about getting caught at it.

- Gene Perret

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

As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.

- Anthony Trollope

At retirement, switching from “I must” to “I want” leaves me puzzled and uneasy.

- Mason Cooley

In retirement, only money and symptoms are consequential.

- Mason Cooley

In retirement, I look for days off from my days off.

- Mason Cooley

I mean to retire, where nobody will have heard about my special skills. And conversation is mainly about the weather.

- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

'Tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths, while we
Unburdened crawl toward death.

- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), British dramatist & poet. Lear, in King Lear, Act 1, sc.1

Being sixty-five ... became a crossroads. We said, we have nothing to lose, so we can raise hell.

- Maggie Kuhn

I retired from work and I didn’t want to just sit there and do nothing; I don’t knit and I don’t like TV and I’m no gardener.

- Margaret Demers (b. c. 1917), U.S. college student. At 76-year-old the retired office worker was explaining why she had enrolled as an undergraduate student at Worcester State College in Massachusetts.

I think retirement beats the heck out of life after death, that’s for sure.

- Martina Navratilova

When some fellers decide to retire nobody knows the difference.

- Kin Hubbard 1868-1930, American humorist, journalist

I’m not in the speech making business nowadays. I’m following the advice of an old mountain woman who said: ‘When I walks, I walk slowly. When I sits, I sits loosely. And when I feel a worry coming on, I just go to sleep.'

- Lyndon Baines Johnson

Retirement, a time to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

- Catherine Pulsifer

I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.

- Thurgood Marshall 1908-1993, American Judge

Retire from work, but not from life.

- M.K. Soni

It's with joy and sadness that we say farewell tonight
No one more loved or respected has earned this right.

- Charley D

Working people have a lot of bad habits, but the worst of these is work.

- Clarence Darrow

And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

- Abraham Lincoln

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

- Sir Winston Churchill

 Other useful pages to help with your speech:

Figuring out what you want to say and writing your speech is one half of the job. The second half is actually delivering it in front of your audience.