Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 183
“A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.”
Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 25
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb 196
Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former t… 1960Related quotes


“The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.”
Book VII, 1335a.27
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“Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.”
"Our Ancestors' Short Lives"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)
Context: Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
Childhood ended as fast as wolf cubs grow.
One had to hurry, to get on with life
before the sun went down,
before the first snow.

“For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.”
Music and Moonlight (1874), Ode
Context: We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

“A man can't ride your back unless it's bent”
Variant: A man can't ride your back unless it's bent.