This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A young man who isn't a socialist hasn't got a heart; an old man who is a socialist hasn't got a head." - David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
"The author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the "innocence of eye" that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeon-holing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word "trite" has hardly any meaning for him; and always to see "the correspondences between things" of which Aristotle spoke two thousand years ago." - Dorothea Brande
"As we grow old we become more foolish and more wise." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"In infants, levity is a prettiness; in men a shameful defect; but in old age, a monstrous folly." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"The passions of youth are scarcely worse foes to happiness than the apathy of old age." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Instead of casting away our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." - Edmund Burke
"I have no sympathy with the old idea that children owe such immense gratitude to their parents that they can never fulfill their obligations to them. I think the obligation is all on the other side. Parents can never do too much for their children to repay them for the injustice of having brought them into the world, unless they have insured them high moral and intellectual gifts, fine physical health, and enough money and education to render life something more than one careless struggle for necessaries." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own. Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air; The echoes bound to a joyful sound, But shrink from voicing care. Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go; They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all,— There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall. Feast, and your halls are crowded; Fast, and the world goes by. Succeed and give, and it helps you live, But no man can help you die. There is room in the halls of pleasure For a large and lordly train, But one by one we must all file on Through the narrow aisles of pain" - Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"You are never too old to learn." - English Proverbs
"How many and deep are the divisions between human beings? Not only are there divisions between races, nations, classes and religions but also almost totally incomprehension between sexes, the old and young, the sick and healthy. There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other." - Eric Hoffer
"Man started out as a "weak thing of the world" and evolved "to confound the things that are mighty." And within the human species, too, the weak often develop aptitudes and devises which enable them not only to survive but to prevail over the strong. Indeed, the formidableness of the human species stems from the survival of its weak. Were it not for the compassion that moves us to care for the sick, the crippled, and the old there would probably would have been neither culture or civilization. The crippled warrior who had to stay behind while the manhood of the tribe went out to war was the storyteller, teacher, and artisan. The old and the sick had a hand in the development of the arts of healing and of cooking. One thinks of the venerable sage, the unhinged medicine man, the epileptic prophet, the blind bard, and the witty hunchback and dwarf." - Eric Hoffer
"To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world." - Eric Hoffer
"No one is so old that they cannot live yet another year, nor so young that he cannot die today." - Fernando De Rojas
"Wives are young men’s mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men’s nurses." - Francis Bacon
"Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature. Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful. Get the habit of analysis - analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind. 'Think simples' as my old master used to say - meaning to reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles." - Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
"New ideas can be good or bad, just the same as old ones." - Franklin D. Roosevelt, fully Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aka FDR
"The greatest and noblest pleasure we have in this world is to discover new truths, and the next is to shake off old prejudices... A man who seeks truth and loves it must be reckoned precious to any human society." - Frederick II, `Frederick the Great’ NULL
"Evolution needs synthesis, the ecological perspective, and the holistic outlook so that life continues to be possible. That change from the old viewpoint, dividing up the world into smaller parts, towards a holistic attitude is biologically conditioned." - Fritjof Capra
"It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date." - George Bernard Shaw
"The best mirror is an old friend." - George Herbert
"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool." - George Santayana
"Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad functions." - George Santayana
"Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it." - George Santayana
"Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure." - George Santayana
"The release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas." - Harry S. Truman
"For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of the harvest." - Hasidic Proverbs
"None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn." - Henry S. Haskins
"The person who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn." - Henry S. Haskins
"There is no conflict between the Old and the New; the conflict is between the False and the True." - Henry Van Dyke
"I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The head learns new things, but the heart forever more practices old experiences." - Henry Ward Beecher
"A man in old age is like a sword in the shop window. Men that look upon the perfect blade do not imagine the process by which it was completed. Man is a sword; daily life is the workshop; and God the artificer; and those cares which beats upon the anvil, and file the edge, and eat in, acid-like, the inscription on the hilt - those are the very things that fashion the man." - Henry Ward Beecher
"What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages. Our best institutions are like young trees growing upon the roots of the old trunks that have crumbled away." - Henry Ward Beecher
"No one is ever old enough to "know better."" - Holbrook Jackson, fully George Holbrook Jackson
"The hearts of the young are unstable, but an old man, in whatsoever he undertaketh, looketh both before and after." - Homer NULL
"Why this reluctance to make the change? We fear the process of reeducation! Adults have invested endless hours of learning in growing accustomed to inches and miles; to February’s twenty-eight days; to “night” and “debt” with their silent letters; to qwertyuiop; and to all the rest. To introduce something altogether new would mean to begin all over, to become ignorant again, and to run the old, old risk of failing to learn." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"It is precisely in the Old Testament that is reached the highest ethical note ever yet sounded... by man." - Israel Zangwill
"The general notions about human understanding illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things totally unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, nor new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." -
"Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease, and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving old as a servant finish by becoming themselves its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence." - James Bryant Conant
"Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery - courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards and respectable ways of doing things. This is one of the chief elements in what we vaguely call capacity. If you do not dare differ from your associates and teachers you will never be great or your life sublime. You may be the happier as a result, or you may be miserable. Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us." - James Harvey Robinson
"One of the drawbacks of old age is that one outlives his generation and feels alone in the world. The new generations have interests of their own, and are no more in sympathy with you than you are with them. The octogenarian has no alternative but to live in the past. He lives with the dead, and they pull him down." - John Burroughs
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." - John Cage, fully John Milton Cage, Jr.
"This is not a legal or legislative issue alone… We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is a clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities… We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people." -
"Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age – after a matter of ten or fifteen years – they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"
"To walk with God takes courage, and in old ge God asks us to walk with Him." - John LaFarge
"Mythology is a control system, on the one hand framing its community to accord with an intuited order of nature and, on the other hand, by means of its symbolic pedagogic rites, conducting individuals through the ineluctable psychophysiological stages of transformation of a human lifetime - birth, childhood and adolescence, age, old age, and the release of death - in unbroken accord simultaneously with the requirements of this world and the rapture of participation in a manner of being beyond time. For all the symbolic narratives, images, rites, and festivals by which life within the cultural monad is controlled and defined are of the order of the way of art. Their effect, therefore, is to wake the intellect to realizations equivalent to those of the insights that produced them." - Joseph Campbell
"'You put stock in winning wars, 'the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. 'The real trick lies in losing wars, and in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.'" - Joseph Heller