This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Not every age finds its great man, and not every great endowment finds its time. There may not exist great men for things that do not exist. In any case, the dominating feeling of our age, the desire of the masses for a higher standard of living, cannot possibly become concentrated in one great figure. What we see before us is a general leveling down, and we might declare the rise of great individuals an impossibility if our prophetic souls did not warn us that the crisis may suddenly pass from the contemptible field of “property and gain” on to quite another and that then the “right man” may appear overnight – and all the world will follow in his train." - Jacob Burckhardt, fully Carl Jacob (or Jakob) Christoph Burckhardt
"To lead, you have to make a declaration of independence against the estimation of others, the culture, the age. You have to decide to live in the world, but outside existing conceptions of it. Leaders do not merely do well by the terms of their culture they create new contexts, new things, new ways of doing and being." - Tom Butler-Bowdon
"The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
"We are capable of finding unending meaning in a world of constant, shimmering, sometimes threatening change. The task is to keep the question of life in question, and to find in it an unending source of joy and possibility, even in the darkest of times. It is within the constant overcoming of our own limitations and habits, and of the established views of our age, that passive happiness and unreflective contentment are lost, then to be replaced by joyful activity and a glimpse of a broader, more enriching, and more responsible awareness than we have been capable of before." - Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
"The greatest comfort of any old age, and that which gives me the highest satisfaction, is the pleasing remembrance of the many benefits and friendly offices I have done to others." - Cato the Younger, formally Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis NULL
"First, erase your name, unravel your years, destroy your surroundings, uproot what you seem, and who remains standing? Then, rewrite your name, restore your age, rebuild your house, pursue your path, and then, endlessly, start over, all over again." - Andrée Chedid
"I am old enough to tell the truth. It is one of the privileges of old age." - Georges Clemenceau, fully Georges Benjamin Clemenceau
"It is the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that very well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy." -
"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem – in my opinion – to characterize our age." - Albert Einstein
"Each society and each age must find the institutionalized form of reverence which derives vitality from its world image." - Erik Erickson
"In youth the absence of pleasure is pain; in old age the absence of pain is pleasure." - Farmer’s Almanac NULL
"Like produces like. Good produces good. If our all day thinking is positive, constructive, kindly, we produce health, success, and freedom. If our hour-to-hour thinking is negative, pessimistic, mean, we produce sickness, failure, and unhappiness. If our life is governed by Faith we become younger, more prosperous, and more joyous, as the years pass. If our life is governed by fear, the fleeting years bring age, decrepitude, and frustration." - Emmet Fox
"Not every age is an age of heroes. In order for there to be such larger-than-life figures among us, there must be great social causes, such as just wars or liberation movements that call for extraordinary leadership. Otherwise there are no heroic niches to be filled, and we look elsewhere – to business, sports, entertainment – for people to admire." - Robert W. Fuller, fully Robert Works Fuller
"The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"We live in an age of self-dissipation, of depersonalization. Should we adjust our vision of existence to make our paucity, make a virtue of obtuseness, glorify evasion?" - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The kingdom of God is neither an unconditional divine gift sent down from heaven all at once, nor a simple human task to be completed in a few generations. It is both a gift and a task: an infinitely difficult, infinitely glorious divine-human undertaking requiring all God’s power and all man’s devotion, and even so stretching on from age to age as though it were endless." - Walter Marshall Horton
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." - Thomas Jefferson
"People do not define themselves directly through a chronology of life experiences. Rather, they define themselves through the expression of selected life experiences... people crystallize certain experiences into themes… considered building blocks of identity. Identity in old age – the ageless self – is founded on the present significance of past experience, the current rendering of meaningful symbols and events of a life." - Sharon R. Kaufman
"An individual does not comprehend his or her self as a linear sequence – a succession of roles or a trajectory of “socialize” beings, learning and then acting out (or deviating from) a set of socially appropriate rules of behavior. Moreover, identity in old age is not merely the sum of the parts, whether roles, achievements, losses, or social norms. Instead, people dynamically integrate a wide range of experience – unique situations, structural forces, values, cultural pathways, knowledge of an entire life span – to construct a current and viable identity." - Sharon R. Kaufman
"The dominant values of activity and productivity, the overwhelming importance of close family ties as well as friendships, the reliance on good health, and now, in old age, the concern with the depletion of one’s life savings and the fear of senility and dependence are commonly held attitudes…" - Sharon R. Kaufman
"Religions, considered as moral teachers, are realized and effective only when their moral teaching is in conformity with the teaching of their age." - W. E. H. Lecky, fully William Edward Hartpole Lecky
"We accumulate opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest." - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
"Moral courage, the courage of one’s convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle – the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other." - Douglas MacArthur
"It is clearly untrue that we are automatically progressing and that the Churches and religion ought to hasten to adjust themselves to all the novelties of our age." - Karl Mannheim, alternatively Mannheim Károly
"Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop the plane; you can’t stop the storm; you can’t stop time. So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely." - Golda Meir, originally named Goldie Mabovitch, later Goldie Myerson
"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." - James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
"The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life; it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do." - Yukio Mishima
"At particular epochs of their life, [children] reveal an intense and extraordinary interest in certain objects and exercises, which one might look for in vain at a later age… Such attention is not the results of mere curiosity; it is more like a burning passion. A keen emotion first rises from the depths of the unconscious, and sets in motion a marvelous creative activity in contact with the outside world, thus building up consciousness." - Maria Montessori
"Every age seeks out the appropriate medium in which to confront the unanswerable questions of human existence." - Janet H. Murray
"The age of isolation is gone. And gone are the days in which barbed wire served as demarcation lines, separating and isolating countries from one another. No country can escape looking beyond its boundaries to find the source of the currents which influence how it can live with others." - Gamel Abdel Nasser
"Why should we be willing to go by faith? We do all things in this world by faith in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the word of others. by faith only we know our position in the world, our circumstances, our rights and privileges, our fortunes, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our age, our mortality. Why should Religion be an exception?" - John Henry Newman, aka Cardinal Newman and Blessed John Henry Newman
"When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government." - Thomas Paine
"The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next." - Theodore Parker
"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter; to the learned, it is harvest time." - Yiddish Proverbs
"By the time a baby born today in the U.S. reaches age 75, (s)he will have used on average: 4,000 barrels of oil, 54,000 pounds of plant matter, 64,000 pounds of animal products, and 43 million gallons of water – and will have produced over 3 million pounds of liquid wastes and 1,500 tons of solid wastes." - William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
"The great characteristic of our age is not its love of religion, but its love of talking about religion." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen
"One person dies at the age of ten, another at the age of one hundred. Perfect saints die, and so do dangerous fools… Once dead, they are molding bones. As molding bones, they are equal. Who can tell the difference between them? Let us therefore grasp life’s moment – what is the point of worrying about the time after death?" - Yang Tse
"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true." - Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
"To find a place in the budget for the eternal is not in the spirit of our age." - Simone Weil
"Life wants to secure itself against the void that is raging within. The risk of eternal void is to be met by the premium of temporal insurance… social security, old age pensions, etc. It springs no less from metaphysical despair than from material misery." - Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
"Men and women must be educated, in great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, until society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education." -
"Common sense is that collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." - Albert Einstein
"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." - Albert Einstein
"If youth only knew, if age only could." - Henri Estienne, aka Henricus Stephanus