At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.
New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.
The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again.
I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
Old age is the verdict of life.
Judges don't age; time decorates them.
But if the young are never tired of erring in conduct, neither are the older in erring of judgment.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
It is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his age.