Definition of years

"years" in the noun sense

1. year, twelvemonth, yr

a period of time containing 365 (or 366) days

"old age is not for sissies"

"he's showing his years"

"age hasn't slowed him down at all"

"a beard white with eld"

"on the brink of geezerhood"

"she is 4 years old"

"in the year 1920"

2. year

a period of time occupying a regular part of a calendar year that is used for some particular activity

"we've known each other for ages"

"I haven't been there for years and years"

"a school year"

3. year

the period of time that it takes for a planet (as, e.g., Earth or Mars) to make a complete revolution around the sun

"the monarch's last days"

"in his final years"

"a Martian year takes 687 of our days"

4. class, year

a body of students who graduate together

"the class of '97"

"she was in my year at Hoehandle High"

Source: WordNet® (An amazing lexical database of English)

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Quotations for years

I am declined
Into the vale of years. [ William Shakespeare ]

Years know more than books. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Years teach us more than books. [ Berthold Auerbach ]

Wisdom goes not always by years. [ Proverb ]

A day to childhood seems a year,
And years like passing ages. [ Thomas Campbell ]

One hour of joy dispels the cares
And sufferings of a thousand years. [ Baptiste ]

As we sail through life towards death,
Bound unto the same port - heaven -
Friend, what years could us divide? [ D. M. Mulock ]

Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?
A fitful tongue of leaping flame:
A giddy whirlwind's fickle gust,
That lifts a pinch of mortal dust;
A few swift years, and who can show,
Which dust was Bill, and which was Joe? [ O. W. Holmes ]

Avarice is the vice of declining years. [ George Bancroft ]

Years have not seen, Time shall not see,
The hour that tears my soul from thee. [ Byron ]

He that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death. [ Horace ]

Jumping over times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hourglass. [ William Shakespeare ]

As innocent as a devil of two years old. [ Proverb ]

Electric telegraphs, printing, gas,
Tobacco, balloons, and steam.
Are little events that have come to pass
Since the days of the old regime.
And, spite of Lempriere's dazzling page,
I'd give - though it might seem bold -
A hundred years of the Golden Age
For a year of the Age of Gold. [ Henry S. Leigh ]

And send him many years of sunshine days! [ William Shakespeare ]

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years. [ George William Curtis ]

Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]

Alas! the fleeting years are passing away. [ Horace ]

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,
The eternal years of God are hers;
But error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshippers. [ W. C. Bryant ]

My library is a friend of a thousand years. [ Kyo-Sya ]

The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years. [ Pope ]

Thou hast wounded the spirit that loved thee
And cherished thine image for years;
Thou hast taught me at last to forget thee,
In secret, in silence, and tears. [ Mrs. David Porter ]

Condemned whole years in absence to deplore,
And image charms he must behold no more. [ Pope ]

Hail, blooming Youth!
May all your virtues with your years improve,
Till in consummate worth you shine the pride,
Of these our days, and succeeding times,
A bright example. [ Wm. Somerville ]

I knew him tyrannous, and tyrants' fears
Decrease not, but grow faster than the years. [ William Shakespeare ]

The ruses of women multiply with their years. [ Proverb ]

The stars shall fade away, the Sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amid the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds. [ Joseph Addison ]

In those sunk eyes the grief of years I trace.
And sorrow seems acquainted with that face. [ Ickell ]

The more years you have, the nearer the grave. [ Proverb ]

Both folly and wisdom come upon us with years. [ Proverb ]

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state;
An hour may lay it in the dust. [ Byron ]

Once in ten years one man hath need of another. [ Proverb ]

One self-approving hour, whole years outweighs. [ Alexander Pope ]

Years do not make sages; they only make old men. [ Madame Swetchine ]

As this auspicious day began the race
Of every virtue join'd with every grace;
May you, who own them, welcome its return,
Till excellence, like yours, again is born.
The years we wish, will half your charms impair;
The years we wish the better half will spare;
The victims of your eyes will bleed no more,
But all the beauties of your mind adore. [ Jeffrey ]

With equal foot (rich friend), impartial Fate
Knocks at the cottage and the palace gate;
Life's span forbids thee to extend thy cares
And stretch thy hopes beyond thy destined years:
Night soon will seize, and you must quickly go
To storied ghosts and Pluto's house below. [ Horace ]

Years following years, steal something every day;
At last they steal us from ourselves away. [ Pope ]

That life is long which answers life's great end;
The tree that bears no fruit deserves no name;
The man of wisdom is the man of years. [ Edward Young ]

A man may be young in years and yet old in hours. [ Proverb ]

Her years
Were ripe, they might make six-and-twenty springs;
But there are forms which Time to touch forbears,
And turns aside his scythe to vulgar things. [ Byron ]

Wisdom is not attained with years, but by ability. [ Plaut ]

Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy! [ Byron ]

Years steal
Fire from the mind, as vigour from the limb;
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. [ Byron ]

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. [ Alfred Tennyson ]

A thousand years hence, the river will run as it did. [ Proverb ]

His lifetime is full of deeds, not of indolent years. [ Ovid ]

We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. [ Philip J. Bailey ]

So much depends on habit in the tender years of youth. [ Virgil ]

In good years corn is hay, in ill years straw is corn. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Years steal fire from the mind as vigor from the limb. [ Byron ]

Do not think that years leave us and find us the same! [ Lord Lytton ]

Let us weep in our darkness - but weep not for him!
Not for him - who, departing, leaves millions in tears!
Not for him - who has died full of honor and years!
Not for him - who ascended Fame's ladder so high.
From the round at the top he has stepped to the sky. [ N. P. Willis ]

The vicious count their years; the virtuous their acts. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Can that which is not shape, shape the things that are?
Is chance omnipotent - resolve me why
The meanest shellfish, and the noblest brute,
Transmit their likeness to the years that come? [ Dilnot Sladden ]

What tutor shall we find for a child of sixty years old? [ Proverb ]

The first years of man must make provision for the last. [ Samuel Johnson ]

A hundred years cannot repair a moment's loss of honour. [ Proverb ]

I have been dying for twenty years, now I am going to live. [ Jas. Drummond Burns ]

A man travels as far in a day as a snail in a hundred years. [ French Proverb ]

We have but one instant to live, and we have hopes for years. [ Flechier ]

Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach wisdom. [ Bible ]

Twenty years in the life of a man is sometimes a severe lesson. [ Mme. de Stael ]

All the passions die with the years; self-love alone never dies. [ Voltaire ]

We gain justice, judgment, with years, or else years are in vain. [ Owen Meredith ]

We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count. [ Emerson ]

A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage. [ Bacon ]

In a better world we will find our young years and our old friends. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

We lose the peace of years when we hunt after the rapture of moments. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Most men employ their first years so as to make their last miserable. [ Proverb ]

The years as they pass bereave us first of one thing and then another. [ Horace ]

That may happen in a moment which may not occur again in a hundred years. [ Italian Proverb ]

I am young, it is true; but in noble souls, valor does not wait for years. [ Corneille ]

All must yield to the weight of years; conquest is not difficult for time. [ Calderon ]

Admiration is a youthful fancy which scarcely ever survives to mature years. [ H. W. Shaw ]

When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return. [ Bible ]

No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years. [ Tennyson ]

Our years, our debts, and our enemies are always more numerous than we imagine. [ C. Nodier ]

I have not wept these forty years; but now my mother comes afresh into my eyes. [ Dryden ]

The thundering voice that wrings, in one dark, damning moment, crimes of years! [ Percival ]

Great things are not accomplished by idle dreams, but by years of patient study. [ Aughey ]

Love concedes in a moment what we can hardly attain by effort after years of toil. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Must one rash word, the infirmity of age, throw down the merit of my better years? [ Addison ]

Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. [ Southey ]

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least. [ Horace ]

The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable. [ Bruyere ]

One self-approving hour whole years outweighs of stupid starers and of loud huzzas. [ Pope ]

Secure their religion; season their younger years with prudent and pious principles. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

The pretension of youth always gives to a woman a few more years than she really has. [ Jouy ]

The poet's leaves are gathered one by one, in the slow process of the doubtful years. [ Bayard Taylor ]

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; and every little absence is an age. [ John Dryden ]

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use. [ Emerson ]

You must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. [ Beaconsfield ]

Beauty, frail flower that every season fears, blooms in thy colors for a thousand years. [ Pope ]

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment. [ Grattan ]

I love the soul that dares tread the temptations of his years beneath his youthful feet. [ Dr. Watts ]

Of four things every man has more than he knows--of sins, and debts, and years, and foes. [ Persian Proverb ]

Resolution is independent of great age, but without it one lives a hundred years in vain. [ Chinese Proverb ]

What has been sown in the mind of the youth blooms and fructifies in the sun of riper years. [ Alfred Mercier ]

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years' study of books. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]

Born to be ploughed with years, and sown with cares, and reaped by Death, lord of the human soil. [ Byron ]

Winged time glides on insensibly, and deceives us; and there is nothing more fleeting than years. [ Ovid ]

The man of meditation is happy, not for an hour or a day, but quite round the circle of his years. [ Isaac Taylor ]

To acquire a few tongues is the labor of a few years; but to be eloquent in one is the labor of life. [ Anonymous ]

Still on it creeps, each little moment at another's heels, till hours, days, years, and ages are made up. [ Joanna Baillie ]

The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date. [ Colton ]

Scarcely two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all; and there she but maunders and mumbles. [ Carlyle ]

The years write their records on men's hearts as they do on trees: inner circles of growth which no eye can see. [ Saxe Holm ]

In eternal cares we spend our years, ever agitated by new desires: we look forward to living, and yet never live. [ Fontanelle ]

Life sues the young like a new acquaintance.... To us, who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend. [ Goldsmith ]

Time glides away, and we grow older through the noiseless years; the days flee away, and are restrained by no rein. [ Ovid ]

It is necessary to repent for years in order to efface a fault in the eyes of men; a single tear suffices with God. [ Chateaubriand ]

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth. [ Stanislaus ]

Profligacy consists not in spending years of time or chests of money, but in spending them off the line of your career. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

He who loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age will hardly love them enough afterward to understand them. [ Earl of Clarendon ]

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed. [ George Henry Lewes ]

A faithful mother can do more in one quarter in the education of her child, than a schoolmaster can accomplish in years. [ J. W. Barker ]

There is a lore simple and sure, that asks no discipline of weary years - the language of the soul, told through the eye. [ Mrs. Sigourney ]

Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin, but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age. [ Carlyle ]

It does not take twenty years for men to change their opinions of things which had seemed to them the truest, and most certain. [ La Bruyere ]

After a man has sown his wild oats in the years of his youth, he has still every year to get over a few weeks and days of folly. [ Richter ]

The greater portion of our lives is thrown away in fiction; it is only in maturer years that we awake to the stern realities of life. [ James Ellis ]

The true one of youth's love, proving a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. [ Southey ]

Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years. [ George Eliot ]

Academical years ought by rights to give occupation to the whole mind. It is this time which, well or ill employed, affects a man's whole after-life. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

Stories first heard at a mother's knee are never wholly forgotten - a little spring that never quite dries up in our journey through scorching years. [ Ruffini ]

Never build after you are five and forty; have five years' income in hand before you lay a brick; and always calculate the expense at double the estimate. [ Kett ]

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his Pompeii? Deep under ashes lie life, youth, the careless sports, the pleasures and passions, the darling joy. [ William M. Thackeray ]

Paradise, as described by the theologians, seems to me too musical: I confess that I should be incapable of listening to a cantata that would last ten thousand years. [ T. Gautier ]

The poet's delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]

Love is a bird of passage that women await with curiosity in youth, retain with pleasure in maturer years, and allow to escape with regret when old age creeps upon them. [ A. Ricard ]

The amount of honey which we accumulate from the years as they pass, depends not so much upon the number of flower-gardens through which we rove, as upon our powers of extraction. [ Henry Wood ]

And now he shook away the snow of time from the winter-green of memory, and beheld the fair years of his childhood uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. [ Richter ]

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [ Bible ]

He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement seasons. [ Swift ]

A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself. [ Andrew Lang ]

Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago. [ Horace Mann ]

In the poorest cottage are Books: is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him. [ Carlyle ]

This world could not exist if it were not so simple. The ground has been tilled a thousand years, yet its powers remain ever the same; a little rain, a little sun, and each spring it grows green again. [ Goethe ]

The same conditions should be made in marriage that are made in the case of houses that one rents for a term of three, six, or nine years, with the privilege of becoming the purchaser if the house suits. [ Hegesippe Moreau ]

Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. [ Macaulay ]

When I heard that trees grow a new ring for each year they live, I thought, we humans are kind of like that: we grow a new layer of skin each year, and after many years we are thick and unwieldy from all our skin layers. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

A friend whom you have been gaining during your whole life, you ought not to be displeased with in a moment. A stone is many years becoming a ruby; take care that you do not destroy it in an instant against another stone. [ Saadi ]

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years. To hear them talk one would imagine they were in their first childhood. As far as civilization goes they are in their second. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]

The widow who has been bereft of her children may seem in after years no whit less placid, no whit less serenely gladsome; nay, more gladsome than the woman whose blessings are still round her. I am amazed to see how wounds heal. [ Charles Buxton ]

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us; he has inscribed his thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. [ T. Parker ]

Cast forth thy act, thy word, into the ever-living, ever-working universe. It is a seed-grain that cannot die; unnoticed today, it will be found flourishing as a banyan-grove, perhaps, alas! as a hemlock forest, after a thousand years. [ Carlyle ]

With a pretty face and the freshness of twenty, a woman, however shallow she may be, makes many conquests, but does not retain them: with cleverness, thirty years, and a little beauty, a woman makes fewer conquests but more durable ones. [ A. Dupuy ]

But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age. [ Beecher ]

I had fifteen years' apprenticeship on the press of New York, writing editorials upon every conceivable subject, often at a few minutes notice, acquiring in this way rapid thought and rapid expression. ... The proof of genius lies in continuity. [ Amelia E. Barr, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]

A few years hence and he will be beneath the sod; but those cliffs will stand, as now, facing the ocean, incessantly lashed by its waves, yet unshaken, immovable; and other eyes will gaze on them for their brief day of life, and then they, too, will close. [ H. P. Liddon ]

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. Yonder palace was raised by single stones, yet you see its height and spaciousness. He that shall walk with vigor three hours a day will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe. [ Johnson ]

A blushing young damsel of 109 has just died at Mallow, Ireland. She had been an ardent smoker of twist tobacco for 81 years, and finally died in the bloom of her youth. To make matters worse, she was an orphan. Those who do not wish to die young should make a note of this. [ Tobacco Jokes For Smoking Folks, 1888 ]

From the year 1789 to the year 1860 no nation has ever known a more unbounded prosperity, a fuller space of happiness. In the short space of seventy years, within the turn of a single life, the nation, poor, weak and despised, raised itself to the pinnacle of power and of glory. [ Robert C. Winthrop ]

What a wretched thing is all fame! A renown of the highest sort endures, say, for two thousand years. And then? Why, then, a fathomless eternity swallows it. Work for eternity: not the meagre rhetorical eternity of the periodical critics, but for the real eternity, wherein dwelleth the Divine. [ Carlyle ]

One is more honest in youth, and to the age of thirty years, than when one has passed it. It is only after that age that one's illusions are dispelled. Until then, one resembles the dog that defends the dinner of his master against other dogs: after this period, he takes his share of it with the others. [ Chamfort ]

It takes twenty years to bring man from the state of embryo, and from that of a mere animal, as he is in his first infancy, to the point when his reason begins to dawn. It has taken thirty centuries to know his structure; it would take eternity to know something of his soul; it takes but an instant to kill him. [ Voltaire ]

First, girls, don't smoke--that is, don't smoke to excess. I am seventy-three and a half years old, and have been smoking seventy-three of them. But I never smoke to excess - that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time. Second, don't drink - that is, don't drink to excess. Third, don't marry - I mean, to excess. [ Mark Twain, "Advice To Girls", 1909 ]

Often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us, as village children, a grove of pleasure, has in after years of manhood, and in the town, given us by its old perfume, an indescribable transport back into godlike childhood; and how, like a flower goddess, it has raised us into the first embracing Aurora clouds of our first dim feelings! [ Richter ]

Metaphysicians have been learning their lessons for the last four thousand years, and it is high time that they should now begin to teach us something. Can any of the tribe inform us why all the operations of the mind are carried on with undiminished strength and activity in dreams, except the judgment, which alone is suspended and dormant? [ Colton ]

The only thing that has been taught successfully to women is to wear becomingly the fig-leaf they received from their first mother. Everything that is said and repeated for the first eighteen or twenty years of a woman's life is reduced to this: My daughter, take care of your fig-leaf; your fig-leaf becomes you; your fig-leaf does not become you. [ Diderot ]

It is a mathematical demonstration, that these twenty-six letters admit of so many changes in their order, and make such a long roll of differently-ranged alphabets, not two of which are alike, that they could not all be exhausted though a million millions of writers should each write above a thousand alphabets a day for the space of a million millions of years. [ R. Bentley ]

Cheeriness is a thing to be more profoundly grateful for than all that genius ever inspired or talent ever accomplished. Next best to natural, spontaneous cheeriness is deliberate, intended and persistent cheeriness, which we can create, can cultivate and can so foster and cherish that after a few years the world will never suspect that it was not an hereditary gift. [ Helen Hunt Jackson ]

A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time; but that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second; for there is a youth in thoughts as well as in ages; and yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old, and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely. [ Bacon ]

Who is there who has not experienced that often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us as village children a grove of pleasure, has in after years of manhood, and in the town, given us. by its old perfume an indescribable transport back into godlike childhood; and how, like a flower-goddess, it has raised us into the first embracing Aurora-clouds of our first dim feelings? [ Richter ]

For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom - silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone. [ Bishop R. S. Foster ]

The mother begins her process of training with the infant in her arms. It is she who directs, so to speak, its first mental and spiritual pulsations; she conducts it along the impressible years of childhood and youth, and hopes to deliver it to the rough contests and tumultuous scenes of life, armed by those good principles which her child has received from maternal care and love. [ D. Webster ]

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. [ Barry Cornwall ]

When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself. [ Macaulay ]

There have been many men who left behind them that which hundreds of years have not worn out. The earth has Socrates and Plato to this day. The world is richer yet by Moses and the old prophets than by the wisest statesmen. We are indebted to the past. We stand in the greatness of ages that are gone rather than in that of our own. But of how many of us shall it be said that, being dead, we yet speak? [ Beecher ]

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all - but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered. [ Coleridge ]

Frivolous curiosity about trifles, and laborious attentions to little objects which neither require nor deserve a moment's thought, lower a man, who from thence is thought (and not unjustly) incapable of greater matters. Cardinal de Retz very sagaciously marked out Cardinal Chigi for a little mind, from the moment he told him that he had wrote three years with the same pen, and that it was an excellent good one still. [ Chesterfield ]

I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed; the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air. [ Chesterfield ]

The mother, under whose sole influence the child is for years, from whom it acquires its tastes and character, should not only be educated, but educated in the most thorough manner, and have her mind stored with varied learning, so that she may be able to answer the multitude of questions that will be put to her by her inquisitive child on art, science, literature, and religion, and thus to stimulate his curiosity, and awaken his mind. [ E. B. Ramsay ]

We see a world of pains taken and the best years of life spent in collecting a set of thoughts in a college for the conduct of life, and after all the man so qualified shall hesitate in his speech to a good suit of clothes, and want commonsense before an agreeable woman. Hence it is that wisdom, valour, justice and learning cannot keep a man in countenance that is possessed with these excellencies, if he wants that inferior art of life and behaviour called good-breeding. [ Steele ]

Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries, in a thousand years, have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. [ Emerson ]

It is good for any man to be alone with nature and himself, or with a friend who knows when silence is more sociable than talk, In the wilderness alone, there where nature worships God. It is well to be in places where man is little and God is great, where what he sees all around him has the same look as it had a thousand years ago, and will have the same, in all likelihood, when he has been a thousand years in his grave. It abates and rectifies a man, if he is worth the process. [ Sydney Smith ]

Threescore years and ten! It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-tail but lights out. You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer - and without prejudice - for they are not legally collectable. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. I early found that those were too expensive for me: I have always bought cheap cigars - reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven, now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes; it's seven. But that includes the barrel. I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy or debasing object in its motive; we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining years; but perhaps it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure; and our affections seem to expand at the sight of the first blossom under the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be. With summer flowers we seem to live, as with our neighbors, in harmony and good order; but spring flowers are cherished as private friendships. [ G. A. Sola ]

Since I was seven years old I have seldom take, a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on allopathic medicines. Not that I needed them, for I don't think I did; it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. We had nine barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. The rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. I had it all. By the time the drugstore was exhausted my health was established, and there has never been much the matter with me since. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

With whatever respect and admiration a child may regard a father, whose example has called forth his energies, and animated him in his various pursuits, he turns with greater affection and intenser love to a kind-hearted mother; the same emotion follows him through life; and when the changing vicissitudes of after years have removed his parents from him, seldom does the remembrance of his mother occur to his mind, unaccompanied by the most affectionate recollections. Show me a man, though his brow be furrowed, and his hair grey, who has forgotten his mother, and I shall suspect that something is going on wrong within him; either his memory is impaired, or a hard heart is beating in his bosom. [ Mogridge ]

No woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the colored. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try to talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That has all gone out now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter she is perfectly satisfied. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]

Mother! How many delightful associations cluster around that word! The innocent smiles of infancy, the gambols of boyhood, and the happiest hours of riper years! When my heart aches and my limbs are weary travelling the thorny path of life, I sit down on some mossy stone, and closing my eyes on real scenes, send my spirit back to the days of early life; I feel afresh my infant joys and sorrows, till my spirit recovers its tone, and is willing to pursue its journey. But in all these reminiscences my mother rises; if I seat myself upon my cushion, it is at her side; if I sing, it is to her ear; if I walk the walls or the meadows, my little hand is in my mother's, and my little feet keep company with hers; when my heart bounds with its best joy, it is because at the performance of some task, or the recitation of some verses, I receive a present from her hand. There is no velvet so soft as a mother's lap, no rose so lovely as her smile, no path so flowery as that imprinted with her footsteps. [ Bishop Thomson ]

In the matter of diet - which is another main thing - I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince-pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn't loaded. For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until seven-thirty in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - that if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there's a cemetery. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]

years in Scrabble®

The word years is playable in Scrabble®, no blanks required.

Scrabble® Letter Score: 8

Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays In The Letters years:

YEARS
(36)
RESAY
(36)
 

All Scrabble® Plays For The Word years

YEARS
(36)
YEARS
(32)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(20)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(13)
YEARS
(13)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(8)

The 200 Highest Scoring Scrabble® Plays For Words Using The Letters In years

YEARS
(36)
RESAY
(36)
EASY
(33)
YEAS
(33)
YARE
(33)
YEAR
(33)
YEARS
(32)
RESAY
(32)
SAYER
(27)
RESAY
(27)
SAYER
(27)
SAYER
(27)
RESAY
(27)
RESAY
(27)
YEARS
(27)
SAYER
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
RESAY
(24)
RAYS
(24)
AYES
(24)
SAYER
(24)
SAYER
(24)
YEAS
(24)
AYES
(24)
RESAY
(24)
RESAY
(24)
RESAY
(24)
RESAY
(24)
YARE
(24)
YEARS
(24)
RAYS
(24)
EASY
(24)
YEARS
(24)
SAYER
(24)
YEAR
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
YEARS
(24)
EASY
(22)
YEAS
(22)
YEAR
(22)
YARE
(22)
AYES
(21)
EASY
(21)
RAYS
(21)
EASY
(21)
AYES
(21)
RAYS
(21)
EASY
(21)
RAYS
(21)
RAYS
(21)
EASY
(21)
AYES
(21)
YEAR
(21)
YEAR
(21)
AYES
(21)
YEAR
(21)
YEAR
(21)
YARE
(21)
YEAS
(21)
YEAS
(21)
YARE
(21)
YARE
(21)
YARE
(21)
YEAS
(21)
YEAS
(21)
YEARS
(20)
RESAY
(20)
SAYER
(20)
SAYER
(20)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(18)
AYS
(18)
AYS
(18)
AYS
(18)
YES
(18)
YES
(18)
RAY
(18)
RAY
(18)
SAYER
(18)
YEA
(18)
RAY
(18)
SAYER
(18)
SAY
(18)
SAY
(18)
SAY
(18)
RYE
(18)
RYE
(18)
RYE
(18)
YAR
(18)
YEA
(18)
YAR
(18)
RESAY
(18)
RESAY
(18)
YAR
(18)
RESAY
(18)
SAYER
(18)
YEA
(18)
SAYER
(18)
YES
(18)
AYE
(18)
AYE
(18)
AYE
(18)
RAYS
(16)
RESAY
(16)
YEAR
(16)
RAYS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
EASY
(16)
SAYER
(16)
YARE
(16)
RESAY
(16)
YEAS
(16)
SAYER
(16)
RESAY
(16)
SAYER
(16)
SAYER
(16)
YEARS
(16)
AYES
(16)
SAYER
(16)
YEARS
(16)
AYES
(16)
RESAY
(16)
YEARS
(16)
RESAY
(16)
SAYER
(16)
ERAS
(15)
SEAR
(15)
AYES
(15)
EARS
(15)
ERAS
(15)
SERA
(15)
YEAR
(15)
YEAS
(15)
EARS
(15)
AY
(15)
YA
(15)
YA
(15)
AY
(15)
EASY
(15)
SERA
(15)
SEAR
(15)
ARES
(15)
YARE
(15)
ARES
(15)
RAYS
(15)
YE
(15)
YE
(15)
YEAR
(14)
YEAS
(14)
AYE
(14)
EASY
(14)
RAYS
(14)
AYS
(14)
AYES
(14)
EASY
(14)
YEAS
(14)
YEA
(14)
RAYS
(14)
RAYS
(14)
AYES
(14)
SAY
(14)
YEAR
(14)
YEAS
(14)
YEAR
(14)
AYES
(14)
YEAS
(14)
AYES
(14)
YARE
(14)
RAYS
(14)
EASY
(14)
YEAR
(14)
YARE
(14)
RAY
(14)
RYE
(14)
EASY
(14)
YES
(14)
YARE
(14)
YAR
(14)
YARE
(14)
SAYER
(13)
YEARS
(13)
RESAY
(13)
RESAY
(13)
YA
(13)
YE
(13)
SAYER
(13)
AY
(13)
YEARS
(13)
AYE
(12)
ERAS
(12)
SAYER
(12)
SEAR
(12)
AYE
(12)
RAY
(12)
RAY
(12)
ERAS
(12)

years in Words With Friends™

The word years is playable in Words With Friends™, no blanks required.

Words With Friends™ Letter Score: 7

Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays In The Letters years:

RESAY
(39)
YEARS
(39)
 

All Words With Friends™ Plays For The Word years

YEARS
(39)
YEARS
(28)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(26)
YEARS
(21)
YEARS
(21)
YEARS
(21)
YEARS
(20)
YEARS
(18)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(15)
YEARS
(15)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(12)
YEARS
(11)
YEARS
(11)
YEARS
(11)
YEARS
(11)
YEARS
(11)
YEARS
(10)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(9)
YEARS
(8)
YEARS
(8)
YEARS
(8)
YEARS
(8)
YEARS
(7)

The 200 Highest Scoring Words With Friends™ Plays Using The Letters In years

RESAY
(39)
YEARS
(39)
YEAR
(36)
YEAS
(36)
EASY
(36)
YARE
(36)
YEARS
(28)
RESAY
(28)
SAYER
(28)
SAYER
(27)
SAYER
(27)
YEARS
(27)
YEARS
(27)
SAYER
(27)
RESAY
(27)
YEARS
(27)
RESAY
(27)
SAYER
(27)
RESAY
(27)
YEARS
(26)
RESAY
(26)
YEAR
(24)
RAYS
(24)
RAYS
(24)
AYES
(24)
AYES
(24)
YARE
(24)
EASY
(24)
YEAS
(24)
RESAY
(21)
YEARS
(21)
SAYER
(21)
SAYER
(21)
SAYER
(21)
YEARS
(21)
RESAY
(21)
YEARS
(21)
RESAY
(21)
YEARS
(20)
RESAY
(20)
YARE
(18)
SERA
(18)
YARE
(18)
ERAS
(18)
YARE
(18)
YARE
(18)
EASY
(18)
SERA
(18)
EARS
(18)
EASY
(18)
AYES
(18)
YARE
(18)
YEAS
(18)
SEAR
(18)
SEAR
(18)
AYES
(18)
EASY
(18)
EASY
(18)
EASY
(18)
AYES
(18)
SAYER
(18)
SAYER
(18)
YEAS
(18)
AYES
(18)
YEAS
(18)
EARS
(18)
ARES
(18)
YEAR
(18)
ERAS
(18)
YEAR
(18)
YEAR
(18)
YEARS
(18)
RAYS
(18)
YEAS
(18)
YEAR
(18)
RAYS
(18)
YEAR
(18)
RAYS
(18)
RAYS
(18)
RESAY
(18)
YEAS
(18)
ARES
(18)
SAYER
(16)
SAYER
(16)
YEARS
(16)
SAYER
(16)
YEARS
(16)
YEARS
(16)
SAYER
(16)
RESAY
(16)
RESAY
(16)
RESAY
(16)
RESAY
(15)
RYE
(15)
RESAY
(15)
RYE
(15)
RAY
(15)
AYS
(15)
RYE
(15)
RAY
(15)
RAY
(15)
SAY
(15)
SAY
(15)
AYS
(15)
SAY
(15)
AYS
(15)
SAYER
(15)
YES
(15)
SAYER
(15)
YEARS
(15)
AYE
(15)
YAR
(15)
YAR
(15)
YES
(15)
AYE
(15)
YES
(15)
YEA
(15)
YEARS
(15)
YAR
(15)
AYE
(15)
YEA
(15)
YEA
(15)
YEARS
(14)
RESAY
(14)
SAYER
(14)
RESAY
(14)
RESAY
(14)
YEAR
(14)
RESAY
(14)
YEAR
(14)
YARE
(14)
RESAY
(14)
YEARS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
RAYS
(14)
RAYS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
RAYS
(14)
YEARS
(14)
RESAY
(14)
YEARS
(14)
SAYER
(14)
SAYER
(14)
AYES
(14)
EASY
(14)
AYES
(14)
EASY
(14)
YEAS
(14)
AYES
(14)
YARE
(14)
YEAS
(14)
SAYER
(14)
SAYER
(14)
SAYER
(13)
SAY
(13)
RAY
(13)
YAR
(13)
YEA
(13)
YES
(13)
EASY
(12)
YEAS
(12)
YEAS
(12)
ERAS
(12)
RAYS
(12)
ERAS
(12)
ERAS
(12)
YEAS
(12)
YEAS
(12)
RAYS
(12)
YEAS
(12)
ERAS
(12)
YEAR
(12)
RAYS
(12)
YARE
(12)
SEAR
(12)
SEAR
(12)
SEAR
(12)
SERA
(12)
SERA
(12)
SERA
(12)
SERA
(12)
YA
(12)
YA
(12)
YARE
(12)
YARE
(12)
YEARS
(12)
YARE
(12)
YARE
(12)
YE
(12)
YE
(12)
YEAR
(12)
YEAR
(12)
YEAR
(12)
YEAR
(12)
RAYS
(12)
RAYS
(12)
SEAR
(12)
RESAY
(12)
AY
(12)
ARES
(12)

Words containing the sequence years

Words that start with years (1 word)

Words with years in them (1 word)

Words that end with years (4 words)

Word Growth involving years

Shorter words in years

ar ars ears

ar ear ears

ar ear year

ye yea year

Longer words containing years

lightyears

schoolyears

yesteryears