"If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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