“How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.”
Runaway Horses (1969), as translated by Michael Gallagher (1973).
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Yukio Mishima 60
Japanese author 1925–1970Related quotes
Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 149.

Swenson, 1959, p. 21
1840s, Either/Or (1843)

"Experience" (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 4-5

Original in German: Einen solchen Standpunkt fand Goethe früh in Spinoza, und er erkennet mit Freuden, wie sehr die Ansichten dieses großen Denkers den Bedürfnissen seiner Jugend gemäß gewesen. Er fand in ihm sich selber, und so konnte er sich auch an ihm auf das schönste befestigen.
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1831
A - F

“He whom the gods protect : the youth is dying whilst he is in health, and has his senses and his judgment sound.”
Quem di diligent, adolescens moritur, dum valet, sentit, sapit.
Bacchides Act IV, scene 7, line 18.
Variant translation: He whom the gods love dies young. (translator unknown)
Derived from Menander's The Double Deceiver; but only the Plautine version was known until the rediscovery of Menander in the 20th century; sometimes translated as "favor" instead of "love".
Bacchides (The Bacchises)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 345.

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old