This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Religion has treated knowledge sometimes as an enemy, sometimes as an hostage; often as a captive and more often as a child; but knowledge has become of age, and religion must either renounce her acquaintance, or introduce her as a companion and respect her as a friend." - Charles Caleb Colton
"The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain." - Charles Caleb Colton
"When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years." - Charlotte Brontë
"To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"In our age, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art - especially of a painting - by how widely and how well it is reproduced?" - Daniel Boorstin, fully Daniel Joseph Boorstin
"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." - David Thomas
"Spiritual truth is truth in whatever age, but the tasks of its service change as society changes." - Dorothy Thompson
"Age loves to give good precepts to console itself for being no longer able to give bad examples." - 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
"Intellectual blemishes, like facial ones, grow more prominent with age." - 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
"Old age consoles itself by giving good precepts for being unable to give bad examples." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"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." - Edmund Burke
"To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind." - Edmund Burke
"Every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown." - Edward Gibbon
"There is no part of you that is indefinable and changeless, that does not get lost or change with age, disease, or circumstances." - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
"Knowledge in youth is wisdom in age." - English Proverbs
"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." - Eric Hoffer
"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." - 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
"It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn." - Eric Hoffer
"Wives are young men’s mistresses; companions for middle age; and old men’s nurses." - Francis Bacon
"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." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing." - George Bernard Shaw
"Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk." - George MacDonald
"In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." - George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair
"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
"Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned." - Gerald Brenan, fully Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan
"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age." - Gloria Steinem
"Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age. When the sense of curiosity has withered." - Graham Greene
"For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of the harvest." - Hasidic Proverbs
"One of the paradoxical lessons of the nuclear age is that at the moment when we are acquiring an unparalleled command over nature, we are forced to realize as never before that the problems of survival will have to be solved above all in the minds of men. In this task the fate of the mammoth and the dinosaur may serve as a warning that brute strength does not always supply the mechanism in the struggle for survival." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"The vision of a world community based on justice, not power, is the necessity of our age." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Let me but live from year to year, with forward face and unreluctant soul; not hurrying to, nor turning from, the goal; not mourning for the things that disappear in the dim past, nor holding back in fear from what the future veils; but with a whole and happy heart, that pays its toll to Youth and Age, and travels with cheer. So let the way wind up the hill or down o’er rough and smooth, the journey will be joy: still seeking what I sought when but a boy, new friendship, high adventure, and a crown, my heart will keep the courage of the quest, and hope the road’s last turn will be the best." - Henry Van Dyke
"Age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"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
"For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"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
"Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; to the one it is exceedingly long, to the other exceedingly short." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Men are called fools in one age for not knowing what they were called fools for averring in the age before." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Two sentiments alone suffice for man, were he to live the age of the rocks, love, and the contemplation of the Deity." - Isaac Watts
"When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute." - James Bryant Conant
"There are truths which some men despise because they have not examined, and which they will not examine because they despise. There is one signal instance on record where this kind of prejudice was overcome by a miracle; but the age of miracles is past, while that of prejudice remains." - James Bryant Conant