Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Parry

Parry’s couplet sounds like a nursery rhyme, then lands like a social operating system. The sing-song meter and simple metals do the persuasive work: you can hum it, so you’ll remember it, and if you remember it, you might live by it. As a composer, Parry understood that sentiment sticks best when it’s structured.

The intent is balancing appetite and loyalty. “Make new friends” gives permission to expand, to be curious, to move through new rooms without guilt. Then the pivot: “but keep the old.” The line quietly frames social life as something you can mishandle through neglect, not malice. Friendship isn’t lost by betrayal so much as by letting time do what it does. The metals metaphor is a gentle value hierarchy: new connections sparkle with possibility (silver’s shine), but long friendships have been pressure-tested. Gold doesn’t just look good; it keeps its worth when trends change.

The subtext is an argument against the modern temptation to treat people as phases. Even in Parry’s era, mobility, industry, and urban life were reshaping communities; today the churn is algorithmic. The rhyme anticipates the way novelty can masquerade as meaning. It doesn’t demonize the new; it warns against confusing access with intimacy.

Context matters: Parry worked in a culture where music functioned as communal glue, sung in homes, chapels, and schools. This reads like a lyric designed to circulate, a small moral melody: go meet the world, but don’t amputate your past to do it.