Aging & Wisdom Quote by Josh Billings

Youth, in Billings's hands, isn't noble; it's indiscriminate. "A puppy plays with every pup he meets" is less a Hallmark image than a jab at the way early life confuses availability with connection. The puppy's friendliness is reflexive, almost mechanical: everyone is a potential playmate because nothing has yet cost enough to make the animal choose.

Then Billings snaps the frame shut with the old dog: "few associates". Not "friends", not "loved ones" - associates, a word that feels transactional and slightly weary. It's a comedian's tell. He isn't selling sentimentality about aging into wisdom; he's pointing at social entropy. Time doesn't just teach discernment; it shrinks the circle. Some of that is pruning (hard-earned taste, boundaries, a better nose for nonsense). Some of it is loss (people move, people die, energy thins out). The line lets both readings sit there and fight.

The intent is quietly corrective, aimed at anyone romanticizing either stage. Puppies aren't virtuous for being open; old dogs aren't defective for being selective. Billings, writing in an America obsessed with self-making and sociability, smuggles in a darker truth: experience can make you sharper, but it also makes you fewer. The wit works because it turns a cute animal tableau into a social ledger - and the punchline is that the ledger always balances against you.