Triumphs of Experience Quotes

“Happiness is love. Full stop.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“It took me many more years of prospective follow-up, and many more years of emotional growth, to learn to take love seriously. What it looks like—God, a nurse, a child, a good Samaritan, or any of its other guises—is different for everybody. But love is love. At age seventy-five, Camille took the opportunity to describe in greater detail how love had healed him. This time he needed no recourse to Freud or Jesus. Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read that children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole. As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric. . . . I never dreamed my later years would be so stimulating and rewarding. That convalescent year, transformative though it was, was not the end of Camille’s story. Once he grasped what had happened, he seized the ball and ran with it, straight into a developmental explosion that went on for thirty years. A”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“As we’ve gone along, I’ve pointed out that a warm childhood relationship with his mother—not maternal education—was significantly related to a man’s verbal test scores, to high salary, to class rank at Harvard, and to military rank at the end of World War II. At the men’s twenty-fifth reunion, it looked, to my surprise, as though the quality of a man’s relationship with his mother had little effect on overall midlife adjustment. However, forty-five years later, to my surprise again, the data suggested that there was a significant positive correlation between the quality of one’s maternal relationship and the absence of cognitive decline. At age ninety, 33 percent of the men with poor maternal relationships, and only 13 percent of men with warm relationships, suffered from dementia.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“And in the meantime, they give those of us who are curious about our own lives, and the lives of those we cherish, plenty to think about. It reminds me of my first day of medical school. “Boys,” the Dean told us (this was in 1955), “the bad news is that half of what we teach you will in time be proven wrong; and worse yet, we don’t know which half.” Still, half a century later, our class has done pretty well by its patients. So I maintain hope that the old-fashioned Grant Study, twentieth-century artifact though it be, can offer some fresh wisdom and some real inspiration to twenty-first-century readers.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“At the end of World War II, some of the Grant Study men were majors; others were still privates. What made the difference? It turned out that the men’s attained military rank at discharge bore no relation to their body build, their parents’ social class, their endurance on the treadmill, or even their intelligence. What did correlate significantly with attained military rank was a generally cohesive home atmosphere in childhood and warm relationships with mother and siblings. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors. We don’t breed good officers; we don’t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes. This result would undoubtedly have astonished physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton (see Chapter 3), whom the Study asked to write its first book.4 I offer this story for its morals. One is that belief isn’t enough—however impassioned our convictions, they need to be tested. Another is that information does nothing for us if we don’t make use of it. My brief excursion here answered a question that the Study had been entertaining from its very beginnings; the data that finally answered it had been available for almost seventy years. And a third: that longitudinal studies protect us from exactly such pitfalls, and from our other shortcomings of foresight and method. They give us the flexibility to re-ask old questions in new contexts, and to ask new questions of old data. That is a very important point of this book, and one I’ll keep returning to.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“I acknowledge readily that the Grant Study is not the only great prospective longitudinal lifetime study. There are others, three of which are better known than ours. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. The Berkeley and Oakland Growth Studies (1930–2009) from the University of California at Berkeley include both sexes and began when the participants were younger; they provide more sophisticated childhood psychosocial data but little medical information.5 These cohorts have been very intensively studied, but they are smaller and have suffered greater attrition than ours. The Framingham Study (1946 to the present) and the Nurses Study at the Harvard School of Public Health (1976 to the present) boast better physical health coverage, but they lack psychosocial data.6 These are wonderful world-class studies, invaluable in their own ways, and more frequently cited than the Grant Study. But even in this august company the Grant Study is unmistakable and unique. It has been funded continuously for more than seventy years; it has had the highest number of contacts with its members and the lowest attrition rate of all; it has interviewed three generations of relatives; and, most”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“For every Decathlon event in which a man was in the top quartile of the Study sample, he received a point. If he had died before the assessment could be made, he received a zero in that event. Total scores, therefore, ranged from 0 to 10. A full third of the men scored 2 or 3; they were considered average on the flourishing scale. If we accept that this Decathlon does address, however imperfectly, several vital aspects of flourishing in late life, then the one-third of the men who received fewer than 2 points from most raters were living less desirable lives than the one-third of the men who scored 4 points or more. A cast of protagonists and their Decathlon scores can be found at the front of the book. Adam Newman received a midlevel Decathlon score of 2; Godfrey Camille, whom I will introduce shortly, received a 5. Of course, judgments about the “good life” can be very annoying. I had an academic partner once who challenged me for saying that Jack Kennedy was mentally healthier than Lee Harvey Oswald. Tastes differ.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“* 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”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“In 2009, The Atlantic asked me to identify the most important finding of the Grant Study since its inception.1 Without any official evidence to back me up, I answered rashly: “The only thing that really matters in life are your relations to other people.” This impulsive response was quickly challenged by a leading business weekly, which put it to me straight: What do romantic notions like that have to do with the real dog-eat-dog world?2 Clearly I had dropped myself right into the middle of one of”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“this book I will focus on the rich potential of a telescopic view of life. There will be plenty of surprises, because a long enough view can turn conventional views of causation upside down. For instance, studied prospectively, physical health turns out to be just as important a cause of warm social supports and vigorous exercise as exercise and social supports are causes of physical health. Some readers will surely be outraged at such heresy, but as Galileo discovered, telescopes can get people into a lot of trouble. Long-term studies are as unsettling as they are enlightening. To add to the uncertainty, we don’t know how far to trust even our latest findings. Time changes everything, and it makes no exceptions for longitudinal studies. It transforms the world we live in while we’re living in it, and pulls scientific thinking forward even while making it obsolete. None of this can be helped; it’s an intrinsic hazard of long endeavors. The more powerful the telescope, the more likely it is that the light we are seeing through it is many thousands of years old. The Grant Study is only seventy-five, but that’s more than threescore years and ten, and in the context of a man’s life, a very long time. Many of the early findings of the Study are ill-conceived, out-of-date, and parochial; some of our later findings will likely prove to be so too. But some, I hope, will endure. And in the meantime, they give those of us who are curious about our own lives, and the lives of those we cherish, plenty to think about. It reminds me of my first day of medical school. “Boys,” the Dean told us (this was in 1955), “the bad news is that half of what we teach you will in time be proven wrong; and worse yet, we don’t know which half.” Still, half a century later, our class has done pretty well by its patients. So I maintain hope that”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“Adam Newman wrote his last words to the Study: “I am happy.” He had become a model of Erikson’s final life stage, the one he calls Integrity (Chapter 5). This was an achievement that was still beyond me; Newman was not nearly as scared of his dying as I was, which probably had a fair amount to do with my failure to recall his cancer. My own father had died too soon to teach me much about adult life, but remembering Newman’s life reminded me of how much I have learned from the Grant Study and its members in his stead. The dying can be happy too.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“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.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“As Newman struggled free of parental domination, he achieved a less constricted morality and became more comfortable with himself. In that greater comfort, he moved toward a greater comfort with, and willingness to be responsible for, others. None of the great psychologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Freud and William James, had had anything to say about adult maturational processes like this. But over the decades, we at the Grant Study have watched fascinated as Adam Newman and his fellows changed and grew.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“Shakespeare delineated seven ages of man in As You Like It in 1599; Erik Erikson defined eight stages in Childhood and Society three hundred”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“Other studies exist now in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States that are larger and more representative than these older ones, and will join them in length of follow-up in another decade or two. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, for example, began in 1957 and included about a third of all of Wisconsin’s high school graduates of that year; it has endured for over half a century so far.8 Eighty-eight percent of its surviving members are still active in the study at age sixty-five. (By way of comparison, 96 percent of the surviving Grant Study members are still active at age ninety!) The Wisconsin Study is more demographically representative than the other studies, and its economic and sociological data are richer and better analyzed. It has a weakness too, however; it lacks face-to-face medical examinations or interviews. We can anticipate a great wealth of prospective life data as these younger studies come into their own. But they will supplement, not supplant, the riches already offered by the Grant Study and its contemporaries.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“All my life I have had Mother’s dominance to battle against.” This realization caused a change in his philosophy of life. Now, he said, his goals were “no longer to be great at science, but to enjoy working with people and to be able to answer ‘yes’ to the question I ask myself each day, ‘Have you enjoyed life today?’ . . . In fact, I like myself and everyone else much more.” He hadn’t become a hippie; it was 1958 and that scene was still some years away, and in fact Newman’s fierce ambition was still burning in his heart. This was just another manifestation of the complexities of the man.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study

“In 1980, Stanford University internist and epidemiologist James Fries recognized that modern medicine was not extending the human lifespan, and yet survival curves were changing. More people were living vitally until eighty-five or ninety, and then dying quickly, like the wonderful one-hoss shay in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem, which ran perfectly for a hundred years and then fell apart all at once.2 Fries called this phenomenon “compression of morbidity.”3 In 1900, because most deaths were premature, the human survival “curve” was a diagonal line; now it is more of a rectangle—especially if you have no risk factors (Figure 7.1). In 2040 there will be ten times as many eighty-five-year-olds as there were in 1990. This is not because the normal human lifespan is any longer than it was, but because fewer people will die before eighty. After eighty the lifespan will reflect little increase. Medical advances like antibiotics, new cancer treatments, and kidney transplants all serve to decrease premature death. But they do not alter the fact that the bodies of most of us, like the one-hoss shay, have not evolved to live past one hundred.”
― George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study