This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return." - Maria Edgeworth
"Many adults draw childlike drawings and many children give up drawing at age nine or ten. These children grow up to become the adults who say they never could draw and can't even draw a straight line. The same adults, however, if questioned, often say that they would have liked to learn to draw well, just for their own satisfaction at solving the drawing problems that plagued them as children. But they felt that they had to stop drawing because they couldn't learn how to draw." - Betty Edwards
"Age does not depend upon years, but upon temperament and health. Some men are old, and some never grow so." - Tyron Edwards
"All children talk with integrity up to about the age of five, when they fall victim to the influences of the adult world and mass entertainment. It is then that they begin, all unconsciously, to become plausible actors. The product of this process is known as maturity, or you and me." - Clifton Fadiman
"This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"No age or time of life, no position or circumstance, has a monopoly on success. Any age is the right age to start doing!" - Paul Géraldy, pen name of Paul Lefevre
"The great trouble with the skepticism of the age is, that it is not thorough enough. It questions everything but its own foundations." - John Monroe Gibson
"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
"Age makes us not childish, as some say; it finds us still true children." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Tolerance comes with age; I see no fault committed that I myself could not have committed at some time or other." - 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
"At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment." - Henry Grattan
"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
"There is one type of feeling which is above all important to foster in childhood. Children have naturally an abundant faculty for wonder and reverence. There are so many books, so many radio and television hours, so many encyclopedias and, alas, so many teachers whose aim is to import knowledge quickly and easily without any element of that faculty which the Greeks said was the beginning of philosophy – Wonder. It is strange that an age which has discovered so many marvels in the universe should be so conspicuously lacking in the sense of wonder." - A. C. Harwood
"Every age has its problem, by solving which, humanity is helped forward." - Heinrich Heine
"Whether a prophet is true or false does not depend upon the correctness of his predictions. It depends upon the purity and sincerity of his concern for the things threatened by human sin and divine anger. Indeed his predictions are the more likely to be correct, the less he is a true prophet and the more affinities he has within himself to the destructive tendencies of his age." - Erich Heller
"The expansion of human power has hardly begun, and what we are going to do with our power may either save or destroy the planet. The earth may be of small significance within the infinite universe. But if it is of some significance, we hold the key to it. In our own age we have been force into the realization that there will be either one world, or no world." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"True greatness, first of all, is a thing of the heart. It is alive with robust and generous sympathies. It is neither behind its age nor too far before it. It is up with its age, and ahead of it only just so far as to be able to lead its march. It cannot slumber, for activity is a necessity of its existence. It is no reservoir, but a fountain." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
"The expansion of human power has hardly begun, and what we are going to do with our power may either save or destroy the planet. The earth may be of small significance within the infinite universe. But if it is of some significance, we hold the key to it. In our own age we have been force into the realization that there will be either one world, or no world." - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL
"As children we all possess a natural, uninhibited curiosity, a hunger for explanation, which seems to die slowly as we age - suppressed, I suppose, by the high value we place on conformity and by the need not to appear ignorant. It betokens a conviction that somehow science is innately incomprehensible. It precludes reaching deeper, thereby denying the profound truth that understanding enriches experience, that explanation vastly enhances beauty of the natural world in the eye of the beholder." - Mahlon Hoagland
"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche
"It is mere childishness to expect men to believe as their fathers did; that is, if they have any minds of their own. The world is a whole generation older and wiser than when the father was of his son's age." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age." - Victor Hugo
"It is harder to avoid censure than to gain applause; for this may be done by one great or wise action in an age. But to escape censure a man must pass his whole life without saying or doing one ill or foolish thing." - David Hume
"Education: To be at home in all lands and ages; to count Nature as a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are the leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in general enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends." - William De Witt Hyde
"Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none; the support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns, and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies; the preservation of General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad... freedom of religion, freedom of the press; freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus; and trials by juries impartially selected, these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation." - Thomas Jefferson
"In this age when there can be no losers in peace and no victors in war - we must recognize the obligation to match national strength with national restraint." - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
"Think of what the world would have missed had a retirement age, even at 70, been universally enforced." - Wingate M. Johnson, fully Wingate Memory Johnson
"We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"A generation without a cause in its youth has no legacy in its old age." - Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy
"We live in a hemisphere whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful force of the modern age - the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"Old age likes to dwell in the recollections of the past, and, mistaking the speedy march of years, often is inclined to take the prudence of the winter time for a fit wisdom of midsummer days. Manhood is bent to the passing cares of the passing moment, and holds so closely to his eyes the sheet of “to-day,” that it screens the “to-morrow” from his sight." - Louis Kossuth, also Lajos Kossuth, fully Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva
"The trouble with our age [twentieth century] is that it is all signpost and no destination." - Louis Kronenberger
"Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age." - Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL
"Study is the bane of boyhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and restorative of old age." - Edwin Herbert Land
"Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age... Time has transfigured them into untruth. The stone fidelity they hardly meant has come to be their final blazon, and to prove our almost-instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love." - Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin
"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter; to the learned, it is harvest time." - Judah Lazerov, fully Judah Leib Lazerov
"Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralist but faintly change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors." -
"American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age." - Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
"There is no such thing as an old woman. Any woman of any age, if she loves, if she is good, gives a man a sense of the infinite." - Jules Michelet
"Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today’s world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind’s benefit, so will history decide whether today’s broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or debase them." - Newton Minow, fully Newton Norman Minow
"All the opinions in the world point out that pleasure is our aim." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche