Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 272.
“The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.”
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (1894)
“Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.”
Of Marriage and Single Life
Essays (1625)
“Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.”
3.
Meditations Divine and Moral (1664)
As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)
Writing for the court, Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).
“Spurned by the young, but hugged by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould.”
Her Moral; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century
Αs translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
The Vocation of the Scholar (1794)
Context: Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, —what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come —"As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them."
