Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Swift

Swift pins human vanity to the wall with a single clean paradox: we crave the extension, not the destination. "Live long" sounds like a blessing, a neat arithmetic of more days, more chances, more pleasure. "Be old" lands as a social category, a visible condition that invites pity, impatience, and erasure. The line works because it exposes how people want time as a private asset while refusing time as a public identity.

The subtext is not just fear of death; its sharper target is self-deception. We treat longevity like a reward we deserve, then treat aging like an administrative error that happened to someone else. Swift, a master of polite cruelty, is reminding readers that their wishes are incoherent: to want a long life is to sign up for the very thing you claim to despise. The joke has teeth because it implicates everyone; it is not "some people are shallow", but "the human wish-machine is rigged to lie to itself."

Context matters. Swift lived in an era when life expectancy was shorter, illness was omnipresent, and "old age" could arrive early, visibly, and without sentimentality. In that world, idealizing long life while recoiling from oldness isn't merely cosmetic; it is a moral and social problem. It reveals a culture that celebrates survival but withholds dignity from the survivors. Swift's economy of phrasing mimics the trap: one desire casually cancels the other, and the reader feels the snap.