Love Quote by W. H. Davies

Youth, for W. H. Davies, isn’t a number on a birth certificate; it’s an appetite. “As long as I love Beauty I am young” turns age into a question of attention: what do you still notice, desire, and protect from becoming ordinary? Davies, a poet who knew poverty and vagrancy before literary success, isn’t selling a gauzy self-help slogan. He’s arguing for a kind of inner stance that can survive hard living: the capacity to be moved.

The line works because it reverses the usual moral hierarchy. We’re trained to treat “beauty” as frivolous, a luxury good, the first thing you drop when life gets serious. Davies elevates it into a test of vitality. Loving beauty isn’t passive consumption; it’s an active allegiance. To love beauty is to keep choosing curiosity over cynicism, perception over numbness. That’s why the phrasing matters: not “as long as I see beauty,” but “as long as I love” it. Love implies commitment, vulnerability, risk. You can’t love beauty from a safe distance.

There’s also a quiet defiance in the conditional “as long as.” It admits that aging is real, that the world grinds people down, that attention can be stolen by routine and disappointment. The subtext is a warning: you become old when you stop being able to be delighted, when you preemptively dismiss wonder as naive.

In a culture that equates youth with surface and speed, Davies offers a tougher definition: youth as the ongoing ability to be fully alive to what’s worth looking at.