This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.
In the age of acorns, a single barleycorn had been of more value to mankind than all the diamonds in the mines of India.
How small a portion of our life it is that we really enjoy! In youth we are looking forward to things that are to come; in old age we are looking backward to things that are gone past; in manhood, although we appear indeed to be more occupied in things that are present, yet even that is too often absorbed in vague determinations to be vastly happy on some future day when we have time.
Age | Day | Future | Happy | Life | Life | Old age | Past | Present | Time | Youth | Youth | Old |
Unselfish and noble acts are the most radiant epochs in the biography of souls. When wrought in earliest youth, they lie in the memory of age like the coral islands, green and sunny, amidst the melancholy waste of ocean.
Age | Melancholy | Memory | Waste | Youth |
Never expect to find perfection in men, in my commerce with my contemporaries I have found much human virtue. I have seen not a little public spirit; a real subordination of interest to duty; and a decent and regulated sensibility to honest fame and reputation. The age unquestionably produces daring profligates and insidious hypocrites. What then? Am I not to avail myself of whatever good is to be found in the world because of the mixture of evil that will always be in it? The smallness of the quantity in currency only heightens the value. They who raise suspicions on the good, on account of the behavior of ill men, are of the party of the latter.
Age | Behavior | Commerce | Daring | Duty | Evil | Fame | Good | Little | Men | Perfection | Public | Reputation | Sensibility | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Will | World | Commerce |
Language was invented to ask questions. Answers may be given by grunts and gestures, but questions must be spoken. Humanness came of age when man asked the first question. Social stagnation results not from the lack of answers but from the absence of the impulse to ask questions.
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.
It is a paradox of the post-industrial age that, despite its technical omnipotence, it is as dominated by words and magic as any primitive tribe. A haze of empty words, coming from the word factories of the universities, is corrupting the air of our ailing cities. The young lurch not so much from one illusion to another as from one cliché to another.
It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.
Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Age generally makes men more tolerant; youth is always discontented. The tolerance of age is the result of the ripeness of a judgment which, not merely as the result of indifference, is satisfied even with what is inferior, but, more deeply taught by the grave experience of life, has been led to perceive the substantial, sold worth of the object in question. The insight then to which - in contradistinction fro those ideals - philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be, that the truly good, the universal divine reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself.
Age | Experience | Good | Grave | Ideals | Indifference | Insight | Judgment | Life | Life | Men | Object | Philosophy | Question | Reason | World | Worth | Youth | Youth |
For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of the harvest.
Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.