Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Related Quotes

José Ortega y Gasset

One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

Age | History |

John Stuart Mill

In this age the man who dares to think for himself and act independently does a service to his race.

Age | Man | Race | Service | Think |

Joseph Joubert

Old age takes from the man of intellect no qualities save those which are useless to wisdom.

Age | Man | Old age | Qualities | Wisdom | Intellect |

Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter

Middle age is when it takes longer to rest than to get tired.

Age | Rest |

Loren Eiseley

No civilization professes openly to be unable to declare its destination. In an age like our own, however, there comes a time when individuals in increasing numbers unconsciously seek direction and taste despair.

Age | Civilization | Despair | Taste | Time |

Josh Billings, pen name for Henry Wheeler Shaw, aka Uncle Esek

I never knew a man who lived on hope but what spent his old age at somebody else's expense.

Age | Hope | Man | Old age | Old |

Lance Morrow

The fundamental rule of the Age of Celebrity: “It doesn’t matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.”

Age | People | Rule | Think |

Laurence J. Peter, fully Laurence Johnston Peter

Middle age is when you stop criticizing the older generation and start criticizing the younger one.

Age |

Joseph Joubert

To the liberal ideas of the age must be opposed the moral ideas of all ages.

Age | Ideas |

Joseph Campbell

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.

Adolescence | Age | Art | Birth | Childhood | Control | Death | Life | Life | Means | Nature | Old age | Order | Rites | System | Time | World | Intellect | Old |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

The great affairs of life are not performed by physical strength, or activity, or nimbleness of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion. Of these old age is not only not deprived, but, as a rule, has them in a greater degree.

Age | Body | Character | Deliberation | Life | Life | Old age | Opinion | Rule | Strength | Old |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

I care more for that long age which I shall never see than for my own small share of time.

Age | Care | Time |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

Nothing maintains its bloom forever; age succeeds to age.

Age | Nothing |

Maggie Kuhn

Ageism is any discrimination against people on the basis of chronological age – whether old or young. It’s responsible for an enormous neglect of social resources.

Age | Neglect | People | Old |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road, the nearer we approach to our journey’s end?

Absurd | Age | Avarice | Journey | Old age | Old |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

It is the blot and disgrace of the age to envy virtue.

Age | Disgrace | Envy | Virtue | Virtue |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

Each part of life has its own pleasures. Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season. We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit. We must make a stand against old age. We must atone for its faults by activity. We must exercise the mind as we exercise the body, to keep it supple and buoyant. Life may be short, but it is long enough to live honorably and well. Old age is the consummation of life, rich in blessings.

Age | Blessings | Body | Enough | Life | Life | Mind | Need | Old age | Spirit | Old |

Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

The fact is that old age is respectable just as long as it asserts itself, maintains its proper rights, and is not enslaved to any one. For as I admire a young man who has something of the old man in him, so do I an old one who has something of a young man. The man who aims at this may possibly become old in body - in mind he never will.

Age | Aims | Body | Man | Mind | Old age | Rights | Will | Old |

Mary Wollstonecraft

Men and women must be educated, in a 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 be fairly inferred, that, till society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education.

Age | Character | Education | Family | Manners | Men | Opinion | Society | Society |