“Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.”

—  Will Durant

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limi…" by Will Durant?
Will Durant photo
Will Durant 85
American historian, philosopher and writer 1885–1981

Related quotes

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 July 1827.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Variant: Poetry: the best words in the best order.
Context: I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
John Maynard Keynes photo

“Logic, like lyrical poetry, is no employment for the middle-aged”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

Source: Essays In Biography (1933), F. P. Ramsey, p. 296
Originally published in The Economic Journal, March 1930. and The New Statesman and Nation, October 3, 1931

David Hare photo

“Our poetry in the eighteenth century was prose; our prose in the seventeenth, poetry.”

David Hare (1947) British writer

Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) p. 143.
Misattributed

Margaret Mead photo

“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary… to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

As quoted in Teacher's Treasury of Stories for Every Occasion (1958) by Millard Dale Baughman, p. 69
1950s

Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Walther von der Vogelweide photo

“He has no equal in medieval German lyric poetry and perhaps not even in European lyric poetry of the Middle Ages.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Ingeborg Glier, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 184.
Praise

Edgar Allan Poe photo
Margaret Sanger photo

“The marriage-bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Alice Groff, "The Marriage Bed", The Woman Rebel, V.I No. 5, p. 39 (edited by Margaret Sanger)
Misattributed

Related topics