Aging & Wisdom Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns the sentimental shrine of childhood into a satirical corridor of incompetence. The line reads like a dictionary entry, but it’s really a surgical strike: by defining childhood as merely “intermediate,” he strips it of innocence and destiny and treats it as one more stop on a conveyor belt of human self-delusion. The joke lands because the phrasing is so coldly bureaucratic. “Idiocy,” “folly,” “sin,” “remorse” arrive in a neat, almost mathematical sequence of moral failures, as if life were an accounting problem and every stage an inevitable deficit.

The subtext is classic Bierce: progress is a myth we tell ourselves to tolerate the passage of time. Each age congratulates itself on being less ridiculous than the last, yet the adult outcomes are only darker versions of the same error. Calling manhood “sin” is the sharpest twist. In most cultural scripts, manhood signals competence, agency, peak usefulness. Bierce reframes it as the moment when responsibility doesn’t redeem you; it incriminates you. Then “remorse of age” suggests that the final wisdom we’re promised isn’t enlightenment, just the grim clarity of consequences.

Context matters: Bierce’s America was busy canonizing uplift - self-made virtue, frontier optimism, moral improvement. A journalist steeped in war’s aftermath and political hypocrisy, Bierce writes like someone who’s watched official narratives collapse in real time. His intent isn’t just to be bleak; it’s to puncture the comforting lie that any stage of life is morally pure. The wit is the weapon, and the weapon is aimed at our need for comforting timelines.