"All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth"
About this Quote
Self-improvement, Shelley suggests, is less a heroic climb than a long, bruising retreat from earlier certainty. The line has the bite of lived experience: anyone "worth anything" isn’t defined by youthful brilliance but by the capacity to dismantle it. That opening gambit is doing quiet social work. Shelley isn’t praising a tidy, moral adulthood; he’s drawing a boundary between people who keep their youthful delusions intact and people who earn maturity through humiliation, revision, and repair.
The verbs do the heavy lifting. "Unlearning" turns growth into subtraction, implying that youth isn’t merely naive but actively crowded with bad ideas - follies you have to pry out like lodged shrapnel. "Expiating" goes further, swapping self-help for penance. Mistakes aren’t just lessons; they incur debt. Adulthood becomes a payment plan, and "manhood" is less gendered swagger than the socially enforced season when you’re held accountable for the fantasies you once got away with.
Context matters: Shelley’s Romantic era prized youthful intensity and rebellion, yet Shelley himself lived the costs of that pose - scandal, estrangement, radical politics, and a life perpetually at odds with respectable society. The sentence reads like a Romantic checking his own mythology. It keeps the fire of youth as an origin story while refusing its self-exoneration. What makes it work is the sting of recognition: if you’re actually building a self, you’re also dismantling one, and the rubble is personal.
The verbs do the heavy lifting. "Unlearning" turns growth into subtraction, implying that youth isn’t merely naive but actively crowded with bad ideas - follies you have to pry out like lodged shrapnel. "Expiating" goes further, swapping self-help for penance. Mistakes aren’t just lessons; they incur debt. Adulthood becomes a payment plan, and "manhood" is less gendered swagger than the socially enforced season when you’re held accountable for the fantasies you once got away with.
Context matters: Shelley’s Romantic era prized youthful intensity and rebellion, yet Shelley himself lived the costs of that pose - scandal, estrangement, radical politics, and a life perpetually at odds with respectable society. The sentence reads like a Romantic checking his own mythology. It keeps the fire of youth as an origin story while refusing its self-exoneration. What makes it work is the sting of recognition: if you’re actually building a self, you’re also dismantling one, and the rubble is personal.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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