This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exist for his sake." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"In his youth, everybody believes that the world began to exist only when he was born, and that everything really exists only for his sake." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"The patriotism of antiquity becomes in modern societies a caricature. In antiquity, it developed naturally from the whole condition of a people, its youth, its situation, its culture - with us it is an awkward imitation. Our life demands, not separation from other nations, but constant intercourse; our city life is not that of the ancient city-state." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"We must not take the faults of our youth into our old age, for old age brings with it its own defects." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Somewhere among the youth of today are minds capable of discovering ways to world peace, ways to deeper and more fulfilling lives, ways to new appreciations of beauty in art or literature or music, just as there have been minds capable of splitting the atom. Ours is the task of breaking through the thought barrier which keeps our young people from realizing their creative potentiality." - Samuel B. Gould
"Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; a mother's secret hope outlives them all." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age." - Victor Hugo
"The same space of time seems shorter as we grow older - that is, the days, the months, and the years do so; whether the hours do so is doubtful, and the minutes and seconds to all appearance remain about the same... In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollection of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly notice at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse." - William James
"A generation without a cause in its youth has no legacy in its old age." - Ted Kennedy, fully Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy
"Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age." - Lactantius, fully Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius NULL
"Study is the bane of boyhood, the oil of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and restorative of old age." - Edwin Herbert Land
"Youth condemns; maturity condones." - Amy Lowell, born Amy Lawrence Lowell
"Society's preservation and man's happiness depend on illusion. Nature itself, which certainly represents the will of God, deludes us in many respects, as when it leads us by the cords of love to reproduce the race. If a youth would consider the trouble in rearing a family, not one in a thousand would marry, but nature closes our eyes to the future (and indeed, wherever popular knowledge rises, the birth rate declines). The same is true of the other passions, which nature utilizes to deceive man and goad them toward the attainment of ends which, when attained, turn out to be but vanity." - Samuel David Luzzatto, aka by acronym of SHaDaL or SHeDaL
"American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's-license age than at voting age." - Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
"It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth - and youth is the time of real tragedy - that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"The meaning of life is to be found in our surroundings and in our relationships... Life is meaningful when we respect the best of tradition while still loving innovation... Life is fulfilling when we marry pride with tolerance, when our deeds and our words are nourished by hope and by realism, when the wisdom of the ages catches the passionate eye of youth. Life on this earth in our time is, above all, a parade of interdependent peoples, interdependent ideas, interdependent solutions. We are all artists of the possible - and dreamers of that which is just now beyond our reach, but may not be tomorrow." - Youssou N’Dour
"Education should be a conscious, methodical application of the best means in the wisdom of the ages to the end that youth may know how to live completely." - Austin O'Malley
"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth; instead of its introducing dismal and melancholy prospects of decay, it should give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world." - Thomas W. Palmer
"In youth the days are short and the years are long; in old age the years are short and the days long." - Nikita Ivanovich Panin
"No one should make a statement like "youth is the happiest time of life" without being prepared to accept its intellectual consequences." - William Lyon Phelps
"Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority." - Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
"Men and nations can only be reformed in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The greater number of nations, as of men, are only impressible in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Happily there exists more than one kind of beauty. There is the beauty of infancy, the beauty of youth, the beauty of maturity, and, believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the beauty of age." - George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala
"This world is a dream within a dream; as we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as he thinks from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of youth as visionary; and the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream. Death - the last sleep? No! it is the last and final awakening." -
"All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"Youth cannot be recaptured once it has fled." - Theocritus NULL
"By exposing them continually to an adult world, which is basically materialistic, we have robbed children of the privilege of childhood. They have been told over and over again that things bring happiness and that happiness is the chief goal in life. We have sold our youth a big lie... Expose hedonism for what it is - a big lie, a mirage that always fades." -
"You cannot have ecstasy and divine vision without bitterness and despair, and both of these are the property of youth." - Edmund Wilson
"The situation of our youth is not mysterious. Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models." - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"We walk into tomorrow on the lives of our youth." - Martha Berry, fully Martha McChesney Bery
"Life goes at such a terrific pace--a few years full of youth and grace and then you fall flat on your face before world history." - Wolf Biermann, fully Karl Wolf Biermann
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires, too soon, too soon - before life itself." - Joseph Conrad
"It is the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my heart sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life - and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is ending, I know that very well, but every day that is left me I feel how my earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, but approaching life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind glowing and my heart weeping with joy." -
"The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth." - Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
"In youth the absence of pleasure is pain; in old age the absence of pain is pleasure." - Farmer’s Almanac NULL
"Every one of us is endowed at birth with all sorts of magnificent possibilities and potentialities. There is a capacity for idealism, a yearning for truth and beauty and nobility, a sensitivity to the hurt of others and to the dreams and needs of our fellow man. In the hopeful dawn of youth we feel these stirrings within us and we promise to bring them to life. And yet so often as the years pass by we permit these promises to be swept under the rug of expediency. We chalk them up to immaturity and we go on to live “more realistically.”" - Sidney Greenberg
"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made. Our times are in His hand Who saith: “A whole I planned, youth shows but half; trust God: see all nor be afraid.”" - Jean Grou, fully Jean Nicholas Grou
"What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"The toddler must say "no" in order to find out who she is. The adolescent says "no" to assert who she is not." - Louise J. Kaplan
"The secret of eternal youth is arrested development." - Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth