Ageing
An average weekday is most of your life
Wisdoms from reading and listening:
Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than from fact. Only through time and experience do we get a clearness of view, as we shed false notions put into us as youth, and begin to see reality as is.
Over time, you start trading expectation for appreciation.
A man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The first 40 years of life furnish the text while the remaining 30 supply the commentary. Without the commentary we are unable to understand the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains, and all the subtle application of which it admits.
The longer we live, fewer are the things that we can call important or significant enough to deserve further consideration.
Freewill only with age? The young man is under the service of impulse, the forced labour imposed by the unconscious. The old man is genial and cheerful because after long lying in the bonds of passion, he can now move about in freedom.
Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire but by eliminating it.
On pursuing happiness in youth, and then encountering reality. A hope that always ends in failure and leads to discontent. An illusory image of some vague future bliss – born of a dream and shaped by fancy - floats before our eyes and we search for the reality in vain.
So it is that the young man is generally dissatisfied with the position in which he finds himself, whatever it may be; he generally ascribes his disappointment solely to the state of things that meet him on his first introduction to life, when he had expected something very different; whereas it is only the vanity and richness of human life everywhere that he is now for the first time experiencing.
On youth vs experience . The world is beautiful to look at, but dreadful in reality. In childhood the world looks like theatre scenery viewed from a distance, in old age, the same scenery from up close.