Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Beattie

Beattie’s line offers benevolence with a blade hidden inside it: the Enlightenment impulse to judge clearly, but not cruelly. “In every age and every man” is a deliberate widening of the lens. He refuses the easy sport of moral superiority, the comforting fiction that our moment is uniquely enlightened or uniquely corrupt. The grammar matters: not “either praise or blame” but “as well as,” a pairing that forces a double accounting.

The intent is corrective. Beattie wrote in an era obsessed with reason, taste, and improvement, but also prone to sneering at the past and pathologizing human “weakness.” As a poet-philosopher who pushed back against fashionable skepticism and cynicism, he aims to keep moral evaluation from turning into moral theater. The subtext is a warning to the critic and the zealot alike: if you only blame, you’re usually advertising your own vanity; if you only praise, you’re laundering reality.

It also works as a quiet democratization of empathy. “Every man” collapses rank. Kings, rivals, neighbors, even oneself: no one gets a monopoly on virtue or vice. That’s a modern idea disguised as a calm proverb. The line doesn’t ask you to suspend judgment; it asks you to make judgment competent - to see mixed motives, partial goods, and real harms in the same frame. In a culture that rewards hot takes and moral sorting, Beattie’s balance reads less like moderation for its own sake than a demand for intellectual honesty.