Centenarian Quotes

Eat your vegetables, have a positive outlook, be kind to people, and smile - Kamada Nakasato, 102-y/o-female fr. Okinawa

If all the centenarians formed their own country, they’d be both the youngest country in the world, and the oldest.

DURANTE: They are eighteen year olds in half centenarians’ bodies.

Enough - the Centenarian’s story ends; The two, past and present, have interchanged; I myself, as connector, as chansonnier of a great future, am now speaking.

He caught Kin's eye and grinned again. Joel often grinned. Palaeolithic genes had somehow met again at his conception, and a slab face like Joel's had to smile frequently lest it frighten small children. When his face brightened it was like the dawn of Man. They spoke, and not merely with words. Between them they were 400 years old. Now words were mere flatcars on which towered cargoes of nuance and expression.

You know what I think prolongs life?" Harry has said. "Art and Music. Beyond that, it is to have a heart full of love, That is the most important thing".

The central fact of biblical history, the birth of the Messiah, more than any other, presupposes the design of Providence in the selecting and uniting of successive producers, and the real, paramount interest of the biblical narratives is concentrated on the various and wondrous fates, by which are arranged the births and combinations of the 'fathers of God.' But in all this complicated system of means, having determined in the order of historical phenomena the birth of the Messiah, there was no room for love in the proper meaning of the word. Love is, of course, encountered in the Bible, but only as an independent fact and not as an instrument in the process of the genealogy of Christ. The sacred book does not say that Abram took Sarai to wife by force of an ardent love, and in any case Providence must have waited until this love had grown completely cool for the centenarian progenitors to produce a child of faith, not of love. Isaac married Rebekah not for love but in accordance with an earlier formed resolution and the design of his father. Jacob loved Rachel, but this love turned out to be unnecessary for the origin of the Messiah. He was indeed to be born of a son of Jacob - Judah - but the latter was the offspring, not of Rachel but of the unloved wife, Leah. For the production in the given generation of the ancestor of the Messiah, what was necessary was the union of Jacob precisely with Leah; but to attain this union Providence did not awaken in Jacob any powerful passion of love for the future mother of the 'father of God' - Judah. Not infringing the liberty of Jacob's heartfelt feeling, the higher power permitted him to love Rachel, but for his necessary union with Leah it made use of means of quite a different kind: the mercenary cunning of a third person - devoted to his own domestic and economic interests - Laban. Judah himself, for the production of the remote ancestors of the Messiah, besides his legitimate posterity, had in his old age to marry his daughter-in-law Tamar. Seeing that such a union was not at all in the natural order of things, and indeed could not take place under ordinary conditions, that end was attained by means of an extremely strange occurrence very seductive to superficial readers of the Bible. Nor in such an occurrence could there be any talk of love. It was not love which combined the priestly harlot Rahab with the Hebrew stranger; she yielded herself to him at first in the course of her profession, and afterwards the casual bond was strengthened by her faith in the power of the new God and in the desire for his patronage for herself and her family. It was not love which united David's great-grandfather, the aged Boaz, with the youthful Moabitess Ruth, and Solomon was begotten not from genuine, profound love, but only from the casual, sinful caprice of a sovereign who was growing old.

Remember how I used to say, “Life is short, and it’s up to you to make it sweet”? Well, I was wrong about that short part. But I still believe it’s up to each person to make the best of life, to keep trying, no matter what. A lot of it is how you look at it. A lot of it is attitude. - Sarah L. Delany

Basically, live foods are those that are created through the natural interaction of the sun, air, soil and water. What I’m talking about here is a vegetarian diet. Fill your plate with fresh vegetables, fruits and grains and you might just live forever.” “Is that possible?” “Most of the sages were well over one hundred and they showed no signs of slowing down, and just last week I read in the paper about a group of people living on the tiny island of Okinawa in the East China Sea. Researchers are flocking to the island because they are fascinated by the fact that it holds the largest concentration of centenarians in the world.” “What have they learned?” “That a vegetarian diet is one of their main longevity secrets.” “But is this type of diet healthy? You wouldn’t think that it would give you much strength. Remember, I’m still a busy litigator, Julian.” “This is the diet that nature intended. It is alive, vital and supremely healthy. The sages have lived by this diet for many thousands of years. They call it a sattvic, or pure diet. And as to your concern about strength, the most powerful animals on the planet, ranging from gorillas to elephants, wear the badge of proud vegetarians. Did you know that a gorilla has about thirty times the strength of a man?

I needed a story. Something local, but juicy. And more than just newsworthy. I was holding out for gasp-worthy. And I found it. Or rather, it found me. Yup, your humble J-school grad was pretty much handed a tale that had it all: sex and drugs (not the regular kinds), multiple deaths (untimely, natch), rich folks and rituals and loads o' lawsuits- even a celebrity cherry on top. My newbie journo peers might be settling for three inches of coyotes in the subway, some spry centenarian's weightlifting regime or a bucket of campylobacter in the church supper salad, but I was planning to debut large and with oomph. The story was mine. I just had to figure out how to tell it.

Centenarians are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population (increasing at the rate of 75,000 people per year).

Traffic was light, but Tommy was nevertheless driving at his standard speed of twenty miles below the legal limit. I wondered, sometimes, what drivers on the freeways of Greater Los Angeles thought when they passed Tommy. Expecting to see some centenarian crypt keeper behind the wheel, they instead saw a Cro-Magnon profile, wild black hair, and Blade Runner sunglasses

One of the latest theories of aging—and my favorite—is presented by my friend and colleague David Sinclair in Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To. The information theory of aging proposes that we age and become more susceptible to diseases because our cells lose information. DNA stores information digitally, but the cells have an analog format that can modulate the function of genes in the sequence of the DNA.

ichariba chode, a local expression that means “treat everyone like a brother, even if you’ve never met them before.” It turns out that one of the secrets to happiness of Ogimi’s residents is feeling like part of a community. From an early age they practice yuimaaru, or teamwork, and so are used to helping one another. Nurturing friendships, eating light, getting enough rest, and doing regular, moderate exercise are all part of the equation of good health, but at the heart of the joie de vivre that inspires these centenarians to keep celebrating birthdays and cherishing each new day is their ikigai. The purpose of this book is to bring the secrets of Japan’s centenarians to you and give you the tools to find your own ikigai. Because those who discover their ikigai have everything they need for a long and joyful journey through life. Happy travels! Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Many centenarians and supercentenarians have similar profiles: They have had full lives that were difficult at times, but they knew how to approach these challenges with a positive attitude and not be overwhelmed by the obstacles they faced.

That’s what people have been doing for centuries—without even knowing it—in centenarian-heavy places such as Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Sardinia, Italy. These are, you might recognize, some of the places the writer Dan Buettner introduced to the world as so-called Blue Zones starting in the mid-2000s. Since that time, the primary focus for those seeking to apply lessons from these and other longevity hot spots has been on what Blue Zone residents eat. Ultimately this resulted in the distillation of “longevity diets” that are based on the commonalities in the foods eaten in places where there are lots of centenarians. And overwhelmingly that advice comes down to eating more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, while consuming less meat, dairy products, and sugar.

Nurturing friendships, eating light, getting enough rest, and doing regular, moderate exercise are all part of the equation of good health, but at the heart of the joie de vivre that inspires these centenarians to keep celebrating birthdays and cherishing each new day is their ikigai.

Thanks to Margarete, Elfriede now attends regular meetings for the centenarians of the Herford District, which her friend invited her to join, More than 1,000 years of life sat there together having fun. 'Even we old people need a bit of love and recognition,' says Elfriede.

I remember hearing years ago about a centenarian being interviewed on her birthday. She was asked, “Throughout your life, you have witnessed amazing change and innovation. The past one-hundred years have brought the inventions of the car, television, air conditioning, and microwave ovens. What is the most extraordinary change you have seen in your lifetime?” Without missing a beat, she replied, “That a teenager can say “suck” in front of their parents and get away with it!” While cultural norms may have changed with the times, being considerate of fellow human beings is not an antiquated notion; its time hasn't ended. Quite the opposite is true. In our world today, kindness and politeness are needed more than ever.

Born on March 20, 1971, she celebrated her 100th birthday this past March. During the war she toured the battle zones, where British forces were fighting by giving concerts for the troops. The songs most remembered from that era are We'll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and There'll Always Be an England. During the Second World War she earned the title of “the Allied Forces Sweetheart.” And in 1945 she was awarded the British War Medal and the Burma Star for her untiring devotion to the Crown and the men in uniform. As a songwriter and actress, her recordings and performances were enormously popular. This popularity remained solid after the war with recording of Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart, My Son, My Son and I Love This Land, which was released to mark the end of the Falklands War. In 2009, at age 92, she became the oldest living artist to top the UK Albums Chart, with We'll Meet Again, The Very Best of Vera Lynn. Commemorating her 100th birthday she released the album Vera Lynn 100, in 2017, which number 3 on the charts, making her the oldest recording artist in the world and the first centenarian performer to have an album in the charts. Vera Lynn devoted much time working with wounded ex-servicemen, disabled children, and breast cancer. She is held in great affection by veterans of the Second World War and in 2000 was named the Briton who best exemplified the spirit of the 20th century.

Compare that to the inhabitants of the island of Okinawa. They consume the vast majority of their calories in the form of rice and yams, those supposed “high-carb killers,” and get just 7 percent of their calories from protein. They live longer than Americans, have among the world’s highest percentage of centenarians (people who live to one hundred), and have far lower rates of obesity. Their old people are vigorous, active, and full of life. Only when Okinawans move to the United States does their health decline—or when they start eating at the U.S.-style fast-food restaurants that have begun to colonize their island.

You don’t need to go to the gym for an hour every day or run marathons. As Japanese centenarians show us, all you need is to add movement to your day. Practicing any of these Eastern disciplines on a regular basis is a great way to do so. An added benefit is that they all have well-defined steps, and as we saw in chapter IV, disciplines with clear rules are good for flow. If you don’t like any of these disciplines, feel free to choose a practice that you love and that makes you move.

Locals eat a wide variety of foods, especially vegetables. Variety seems to be key. A study of Okinawa’s centenarians showed that they ate 206 different foods, including spices, on a regular basis. They ate an average of eighteen different foods each day, a striking contrast to the nutritional poverty of our fast-food culture.

A “longevity dividend” translates to fewer and shorter hospital stays and far smaller medical bills. Over their last two years of life, according to the Centers for Disease Control, centenarians rack up just one-third of the healthcare expenses of people who die younger.

The centenarians don’t seem to have achieved an extraordinary lifespan because they’ve had an easy life, Hutnik says, but because they’ve dealt with stress efficiently when it struck.

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one “died of old age.”1

And when you're doing novelty kinds of things, the feeling is that you have more time. If you lose the novelty effect after 30 years, you've done this, you've done that, then you compress time. Centenarians always have something going. They have a novelty effect, very high. They elongate the perception of time. So

Now for the arresting part: by this measure, the golden age of the Egyptian pharaohs—an era that strikes most of us as impossibly remote from our own—took place a scant thirty-five lifetimes ago. Jesus was born about twenty lifetimes ago, and the Renaissance happened seven lifetimes back. A paltry five centenarian lifetimes ago, Henry VIII sat on the English throne. Five! As Magee observed, the number of lives you’d need in order to span the whole of civilization, sixty, was “the number of friends I squeeze into my living room when I have a drinks party.” From this perspective, human history hasn’t unfolded glacially but in the blink of an eye. And it follows, of course, that your own life will have been a minuscule little flicker of near-nothingness in the scheme of things: the merest pinpoint, with two incomprehensibly vast tracts of time, the past and future of the cosmos as a whole, stretching off into the distance on either side.

Of course, we want to be healthy. Of course. Wanting to be healthy isn’t the problem, but it does ignore how much of it is out of our hands. It’s ignoring that right now at this very moment we are both thriving and dying, and that if we could actually control it, the little 106-year-old Italian woman who smoked and chugged olive oil every day and cited “not marrying again” as the secret to her longevity wouldn’t be the centenarian—we would be. We would be, and we would credit kombucha and sprouts and be so, so proud of ourselves. But that’s not how life works. And it’s not how health and longevity work either.

The Okinawa Centenarian Study, done on the Island of Okinawa in Japan—known as the “healthiest nation in the world”—showed that the secret of the Okinawans’ longevity is mainly attributed to the idea of hara hachi bun me, translated as “eat until you are 80 percent full.”11 This Japanese phrase beautifully mirrors the words of the Prophet , when he said that man should fill his body with “1/3 for his food, 1/3 for his drink, and 1/3 for his breath.”12

You don’t need to go to the gym for an hour every day or run marathons. As Japanese centenarians show us, all you need is to add movement to your day.

CETP and APOC3). And it’s not just centenarians: I have patients walking around whose lipoprotein panels read like a death sentence, with sky-high LDL-C and apoB, but by every single measure that we have—calcium score, CT angiogram,

Centenarian Decathlon as the ten most important physical tasks you will want to be able to do for the rest of your life.

While their onset may be rapid—instantaneous back or neck or knee pain—there was likely a chronic weakness or lack of stability at the foundation of the joint that was the true culprit. This is the real iceberg in the water. The “acute” injury is just the part you see, the manifestation of the underlying weakness. So if we are to complete the goals we have set in our own Centenarian Decathlon, we need to be able to anticipate and avoid any potential injuries that lie in our path, like icebergs at sea. This means understanding stability and incorporating it into our routine.

Suicide note from a centenarian: The suspense was killing me.

Most physicians and patients believe disease risk is set by genetics. This is false, but also the most common excuse doctors give patients when we do not know the answer. We just blame it on genetics and hope you’re satisfied. Don’t be. We learned this from the studies by Nir Barzilai, MD on super centenarians at Albert Einstein Medical College. Studies on people over 100 years old showed they were all found to harbor most of the bad genes we already know about. What was very interesting, however, was that the bad genes were turned off in these people. The ultimate arbiter of a long healthy life is the expression of our genes-whether they are turned on or off. This is called the epigenetic expression of disease.

No vegans or vegetarians were found among the centenarians or super-centenarians.182,183 Boom.

The list ends with “Retreat from meat,” noting that blue zones centenarians only eat about 2 oz or less of meat about five times per month.2393

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than 42,000 consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who lived at least to one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined. Though most were perceived, even by their physicians, to have been healthy just prior to death, not one “died of old age.” They died from disease, most commonly heart attacks.

Dr. Stamler said as much about the Mediterranean diet on the occasion of his hundredth birthday.2483 The centenarian remained committed to his pioneering research2484 even after turning one hundred. We lost him on January 26, 2022, at the age of 102.2485

For example, centenarians have up to about a fifteenfold increase in butyrate producers.7324

Centenarians appear ten times less likely to die from malignant tumors than people in their fifties and sixties (4 percent versus 40 percent, respectively

It wasn’t more than three feet high, but Allan was a centenarian, not a high jumper.

centenarians

There may be no such thing as dying from old age. From a study of more than forty-two thousand consecutive autopsies, centenarians—those who live past one hundred—were found to have succumbed to diseases in 100 percent of the cases examined.

Having interviewed centenarians all over the world, I think the common denominator is not spirituality per se, but a sense of purpose, a will to live.

I’m sure it wasn’t easy being in your big sister’s shadow for 104 years. You complained about it a lot but I know you’d have been miserable without me. Well, I’m glad things have worked out the way they have, because you never had to be alone, Bessie Funny thing is, though, by leaving me here by myself, you're letting me get the last word. Ooooooh, I'm not sure you would have liked that! - Sarah L. Delany

It doesn’t transcend being a father, but to be a painter is to realize a spiritual portion of life. The ability to put things together and make a whole out of visual and spiritual experiences. What have you seen? What have you heard? I found that there’s a thirst for longevity; you want to leave a message for those who come after. ‘Papa was here. Grandpa was here. He felt this about his children.’ Autobiography, that’s what it is. Shapiro was here.