Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

Aging, Galbraith suggests, is inevitable; surrender is optional. The line opens with a blunt concession to biology - “wrinkles must be written upon our brows” - then performs a neat pivot from the visible to the intimate. “Written” matters here: it frames time as an author trying to inscribe itself on us, implying we still get to argue with the draft. Face-lines can be tolerated as mere typography. Heart-lines are a moral and psychological capitulation.

Coming from an economist who spent a career skewering complacency in boardrooms and bureaucracies, the subtext isn’t just self-help uplift. It’s a warning against the respectable kind of old age: the hardening into certainty, the shrinking of curiosity, the reflexive defense of what one already owns or believes. Galbraith’s public persona traded in elegant, dry contrarianism; this reads like his gentler version of the same impulse. He’s not romanticizing youth. He’s defending plasticity: the capacity to revise, to be surprised, to keep sympathies from calcifying into policy preferences and personal prejudices.

The context is a 20th century defined by institutions that aged badly - empires, ideologies, and corporate orthodoxies that kept their power long after their ideas went stale. “The spirit should never grow old” lands as a civic claim as much as a private one: if your inner life fossilizes, your decisions will too. Wrinkles on the brow can signal lived experience. Wrinkles on the heart signal the end of living.