This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Robert Briffault, fully Robert Stephen Briffault
The full-grown modern human being who seeks but refuge finds instead boredom and mental dissolution, unless he can be, even in his withdrawal, creative. He can find the quality of happiness in the strain and travail only of achievement and growth. And he is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment which his life-urges demand when his is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.
Achievement | Character | Conquest | Fulfillment | Growth | Life | Life | Service | Happiness |
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
The confirmed prejudices of a thoughtful life are as hard to change as the confirmed habits of an indolent life; and as some must trifle away age because they trifled away youth, others must labor on in a maze of error because they have wandered there too long to find their way out.
Age | Change | Character | Error | Labor | Life | Life | Youth |
The golden age is not in the past, but in the future: not in the origin of human experience, but in its consummate flower: not opening in Eden, but out from Gethsemane.
Age | Character | Experience | Future | Past |
It is a welcome symptom in an age which is commonly denounced as materialistic, that it makes heroes of men whose goals lie wholly in the intellectual and moral sphere. This proves that knowledge and justice are ranked above wealth and power by a large section of the human race.
Age | Character | Goals | Human race | Justice | Knowledge | Men | Power | Race | Wealth |
Exaggerated respect for athletics, an excess of coarse impressions brought about by the technical discoveries of recent years, the increased severity of the struggle for existence due to the economic crisis, the brutalization of political life: all these factors are hostile to the ripening of the character and the desire for real culture, and stamp our age as barbarous, materialistic and superficial.
Age | Athletics | Character | Culture | Desire | Excess | Existence | Life | Life | Respect | Struggle | Respect |
The blackout of images of women or men visibly over sixty-five, engaged in any vital or productive adult activity, and their replacement by the ‘problem’ of age, is our society’s very definition of age. Age is perceived only as a decline or deterioration from youth.
Why do we look old? Because we remember the weight of the burden of last year's experiences. There is no other reason. Instead of lifting our faces, we should discover that the thing to lift is our thought. It is the mind, not the physical body, which has the stamp of age and reflects it in the body.
Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland
There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
Achievement | Character | Waiting |
Arianna Huffington, born Arianna Stassinopoulos
Consumption, celebrity and the quest for perfection in this world are all subject to the law of diminishing returns: each successive acquisition and achievement will mean less than the one before. Diminishing returns are finally leading to diminished expectations about the promise of finding happiness without caring for our souls. Perhaps we are now ready to reject the hucksters of materialisms that have lured us down so many dead ends, and start again on the road that will lead us back to God.
Achievement | Character | Ends | God | Law | Perfection | Promise | Will | World | Happiness |
Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ
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.
Age | Character | Obligation | Peace | Restraint | Strength | War |
Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has actually become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its nonmystical methods; above all... of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.
Age | Character | Faith | Inquiry | Morality | Mystical | Science | Superstition | Truth |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
This spectacle of old age would be unendurable if we did not know that our psyche reaches into a region held captive neither by change in time nor by limitation of place. In that form of being our birth is a death and our death is a birth. The scales of the whole hang balanced.
Age | Birth | Change | Character | Death | Old age | Time | Wisdom | Old |