Quotes from George E. Vaillant

No whim of fate, no Freudian trauma, no loss of a loved one will be as devastating to the human spirit as some prolonged ambivalent relationship that leaves us forever unable to say goodbye.

Children who fail to learn basic love and trust at home are handicapped later in mastering the assertiveness, initiative, and autonomy that are the foundation of successful adulthood.

The reliable presence of people who love us facilitates our perception and toleration of painful reality and enriches our lives.

As Joseph Conrad said, we need to be taught when young to hope, to love, to put our trust in life.

To the same question a 78-year-old Study member replied, "All the many plans for the day. I love life and all I do. I love the out of doors…. It is a joy to be alive and living with my best friend." He was referring to his wife of fifty years with whom his sex life was still "very satisfying.

As in the inflammations and fevers of physical illness, what looks like trouble may be the very process by which healing takes place. As we become better able to endure life's slings and arrows, our coping mechanisms mature, and vice versa.

One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work."8

The laws of adult development are nowhere near as well known as the laws of the solar system or even the laws of child development, which were only discovered in the last century.

But one of the few thorough studies of nonagenarians has found that 80 percent of them ate red meat regularly all their lives, and only 50 percent ate fruit weekly.21 Perhaps fruit-eating vegetarians do not survive to ninety. Or perhaps, I, like the diet advocates, am merely revealing my own personal prejudices. Either way, survival is not as simple as the wellness gurus would have us believe. The

religion arises from culture; spirituality arises from biology.

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living"; so wrote Henri Amiel in 1874.

It is reasonable to ask whether this book is necessary. Over its seventy-five years of existence, the Study of Adult Development has so far produced 9 books and 150 articles, including quite a number of my own (see Appendix F). Why

The Decathlon was conceived to assess the men's success from 65 to 80, but all but one of the events could be estimated for the 14 men who died between 58 and 64 years of age, and therefore they were included. Men who died before their 58th birthdays, however, were excluded. ** The men were coded

In short, it was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men's lives, as can be seen in Table 2.3.

But one way or another we all have to come to terms with our own sexuality, and the ways that we do (and don't) will end up shaping our lives.

Everyone is consistent in some things and not in others, yet ultimately true to some fundamental essence in themselves. The more things change, the more they stay the same; Newman was part mystic and part engineer, and he remained that way to the end.

There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study (and exemplified by Dr. Godfrey Minot Camille). One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away. And that is why I offer Dr. Camille's story as a sort of outline of the terrain we'll be covering through the rest of this book.