This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
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.
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.
Age | Behavior | Experience | Individual | Knowledge | Learning | Life | Life | Old age | People | Self | Unique | Old |
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.
Age | Events | Experience | Life | Life | Old age | Past | People | Present | Self | Old |
Golda Meir, originally named Goldie Mabovitch, later Goldie Myerson
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.
We accumulate opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.
Age | Understanding |
James A. Michener, fully James Albert Michener
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
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.
The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the next.
Every age seeks out the appropriate medium in which to confront the unanswerable questions of human existence.
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.
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.
William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel
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.
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?
Gore Vidal, fully Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
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.
Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
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.
Age | Despair | Eternal | Life | Life | Old age | Risk | Security | Wants | Old |