This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, old books to read." - Alonzo of Arragon NULL
"Let not anxiety enter your heart, for it has killed many strong men... Anxiety brings on old age prematurely." - Apocrypha NULL
"In every age 'the good old days' were a myth. No one every thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived through them." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"The dynamite of doubt is useful in wrecking old structures; but to build new buildings, we must have the dynamics of faith." - Joseph L. Baron
"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." - John Barrymore
"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature. But beautiful old people are works of art." - Marjorie Barstow
"Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression." - J. Beaumont
"Experience is like a pitiless beauty. Years pass before you win her, and by the time she finally surrenders, you have both grown old and no longer need one another." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne
"If the memory is more flexible in childhood, it is more tenacious in mature age; if childhood has sometimes the memory of words, old age has that of things, which impress themselves according tot he clearness of the conception of the thought which we wish to retain." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"To resist with success the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart; to keep these in parallel vigor, one must exercise, study, and love." - Carl Victor de Bonstetten
"Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"It would be well for us all, old and young, to remember that our words and actions, ay, and our thoughts also, are set upon never-stopping wheels, rolling on and on unto the pathway of eternity." - M. M. Brewster, fully Margaret Maria Brewster Gordon
"There are other similarities between poetry and children's speech. Poets tend to look for significant evocative detail --something straight out of life -- to carry their meaning, and to avoid the vaguely general or abstract terms. With young children it is not a matter of choice. Their ideas must take a concrete form of expression because they have not mastered the art of masking and handling (Sign-mind) abstraction. A five year old boy in an infants' class once said, "Oh, yes, I know Geography. Its polar bears at the top and penguins at the bottom."" -
"We hope to grow old, yet we fear old age; that is, we are willing to live, and afraid to die." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Much has been said of the wisdom of old age. Old age is wise, I grant, for itself, but not wise for the community. It is wise in declining new enterprises, for it has not the power nor the time to execute them; wise in shrinking from difficulty, for it has not the strength to overcome it; wise in avoiding danger, for it lacks the faculty of ready and swift action, by which dangers are parried and converted into advantages. But this is not wisdom for mankind at large, by whom new enterprises must be undertaken, dangers met, and difficulties surmounted." - William Cullen Bryant
"In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. New books revive and redecorate old ideas; old books suggest and invigorate new ideas." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
""Know thyself," said the old philosopher, "improve thyself," saith the new. Our great object in time is not to waste our passions and gifts on the things external that we must leave behind, but that we cultivate within us all that we can carry into the eternal progress beyond." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better." - Samuel Butler
"No one is so old that he doesn't count on living another year; no one so young that he cannot die today." - Charles Cahier
"Joy is indeed a precious quality which very few experience in their lives. The person who knows how to enjoy life will never grow old no matter how many years he can call his own. It is easy to be happy at specific times, but there is a certain art in being happy and contented every day." - Ora Capelli
"The dreary thing about most new causes is that they are praised in such very old terms. Every new religion bores us with the same stale rhetoric about closer fellowship and the higher life." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"I have lived to know that the great secret of happiness is this; never suffer your energies to stagnate. The old adage of "too many irons in the fire," conveys an abominable lie. You cannot have too many - poker, tongs and all - keep them all going." - Adam Clarke
"Every day is a fresh beginning, Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain, and spite of old sorrow, and older sinning, and troubles forecasted, and possible pain, take heart with the day, and begin again." - Susan Coleridge
"The whole world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young and everlasting harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curses of the world." - Robertson Davies
"A laxity due to decadence of old habits cannot be corrected by exhortations to restore old habits in their former rigidity. Even though it were abstractly desirable it is impossible. And it is not desirable because the inflexibility of old habits is precisely the chief cause of their decay and disintegration." - John Dewey
"Make wisdom your provision for the journey from youth to old age, for it is a more certain support than all other possessions." - Diogenes Laërtius, aka "Diogenes the Cynic"
"It's an old adage that the way to be safe is never to be secure... Each one of us requires the spur of insecurity to force us to do our best." - Harold Willis Dodds
"There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
"It's not how old you are that matters; it's how you are old." - Marie Dressler
"True conservatism is substantial progress; it holds fast what is true and good in order to advance in both. To cast away the old is not of necessity to attain the new. To reject anything that is valuable, lessens the power of gaining more. That a thing is new does not of course commend; that it is old does not discredit. The test question is, "Is it true or good?"" - Tyron Edwards
"What we need in religion, is not new light, but new sight; not new paths, but new strength to walk in the old ones; not new duties, but new strength from on high to fulfill those that are plain before us." - Tyron Edwards
"The mere formulation of a problem is far more essential than its solution, which may be merely a mark of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science." - Albert Einstein
"Waste not fresh tears over old griefs." - Euripedes NULL
"It is magnificent to grow old if only one stays young." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late." - Benjamin Franklin
"Young people tell what they are doing, old people what they have done and fools what they wish to do." - John French, fully Field Marshall John Denton Pinkstone French, 1st Earl of Ypres, aka The Viscount French
"For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man." - William Ewart Gladstone
"An old man forfeits one of the greatest of human rights: no longer is he judged by his peers." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"People always fancy that we must become old to become wise; but, in truth, as years advance, it is hard to keep ourselves as wise as we were." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age, for old age brings with it its own defects." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"It is great to have friends when one is young, but indeed it is still more so when you are getting old. When we are young, friends are, like everything else, a matter of course. In the old days we know what it means to have them." - Edvard Grieg, fully Edvard Hagerup Grieg
"Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton
"The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained... There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do... It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way." - Henry Robert Harrower
"Eternity has no gray hairs! The flowers fade, the heart withers, man grows old and dies, the world lies down in the sepulcher of ages, but time writes no wrinkles on the brow of eternity." - Reginald Heber
"The years are going. Let the chaff and the evil part of this life pass with them. As men load the wagon with the sweepings of the street, and, carrying it far to the ocean, cast it into the deep abyss, so bring together all your hatreds, weaknesses, unkindnesses, jealousies, all passions, ingratitudes, and embittering memories, and, tying them into one bundle, let the old ;year sweep them out and drop them into the gulf of oblivion. Expel from your life all sins and sordid aims. Carry into the new year only the choicest thoughts and aspirations. As in the olden days when men approached the Parthenon they cleansed their persons and arrayed themselves in white robes before entering that glorious temple, so cleanse your garments from transgression, clothe yourself with aspirations. Farewell to the past! Welcome and all hail to the future." -
"Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. I am I and you are you. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name. Speak to me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolutely unbroken continuity. Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well." - Henry Scott Holland
"Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.