“Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.”
Shadows on the Grass (1960)
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Karen Blixen 67
Danish writer 1885–1962Related quotes
Robert Kennedy, in "Live Young Forever: 12 Steps to Optimum Health, Fitness and Longevity", p. 10
Source: De potentia (c. 1265–1266) q. 7, art. 5, ad 14
“If a man aspires to the highest place, it is no dishonor to him to halt at the second, or even at the third.”
Prima enim sequentem honestum est in secundis tertiisque consistere. ([http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/orator.shtml#3 3])
Variant translation: If you aspire to the highest place, it is no disgrace to stop at the second, or even the third, place.
Chapter I, section 4
Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 BC)
We the People interview (1996)
Context: Friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue, meaning here, "the habitual facility of doing the good thing," which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a supreme flowering, of the interaction which happens in a good political society.
...in der ganzen Natur, mit dem Grad der Intelligenz die Fähigkeit zum Schmerze sich steigert, also ebenfalls erst hier ihre höchste Stufe erreicht.
The Wisdom of Life. Chapter II. Personality, or What a Man Is: Footnote 19
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Not yet placed by volume, chapter or section
“Sex at age 90 is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.”
1910s, The New Nationalism (1910)
Context: Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.
Source: Platero and I (1917), Ch. 55: "Donkeyography" as translated by Antonio T. de Nicolas (1985), p. 66; also translated as "Assography" in translation by Eloïse Roach.