Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

Irving’s line smuggles a quietly radical idea into the polite parlor of early American letters: the calendar is a blunt instrument, and the real measure of a life is interior. “Age” here isn’t biology or bookkeeping; it’s temperament. By making it “a matter of feeling,” he reframes aging as something partly chosen, or at least negotiated - a stance toward time rather than a sentence handed down by it.

The subtext cuts two ways. It flatters the reader with agency (“you’re only as old as you feel”), but it also indicts a culture that treats years as destiny. In Irving’s era, modernity was accelerating: expanding cities, faster newspapers, sharper generational churn. Against that backdrop, the line reads like resistance to being sorted and sidelined by a number. It’s a defense of continued curiosity and desire - the emotional engines that keep a person socially and imaginatively alive.

Irving, best known for stories that romanticize the past while winking at it, understood nostalgia as both comfort and trap. “Feeling” becomes the antidote to turning one’s life into a museum. The phrasing is deliberately simple, almost proverbial, which is part of its power: it presents a psychological truth as common sense, inviting you to adopt it without argument.

The charm is that it sounds like encouragement. The bite is that it exposes how much “old” is a social role we learn to perform.