Aging & Wisdom Quote by Graham Greene

Greene lands the line like a quiet accusation: morality isn’t portrayed as enlightenment so much as a consolation prize for diminished appetite. “Sad wisdom” implies knowledge acquired at a cost, and the cost is spelled out in the second clause. Curiosity doesn’t mature into virtue here; it “withers,” a verb that makes moral certainty feel less like growth than like the brittle afterlife of desire.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Greene skewers the smugness of late-life righteousness: the older self recasts surrender as principle, turning what they no longer want (risk, transgression, novelty) into what no one should want. On the other, he’s hard on youth’s romantic faith in exploration, hinting that the world’s repetitions and punishments eventually train people into rules. Morality becomes a coping mechanism for exhaustion, fear, or boredom.

The subtext is classic Greene: a Catholic-tinged suspicion of tidy virtue and an attraction to compromised characters who still feel heat in the blood. If curiosity is the engine of empathy and moral imagination, its “withering” suggests a life narrowing into self-protection. That narrowing can look like rectitude from the outside and like defeat from the inside.

Context matters: Greene wrote across a century of ideological crusades and private compromises, chronicling spies, adulterers, and believers in crisis. The line reads as a rebuke to moralistic institutions as much as to individuals: when a culture runs out of curiosity, it doesn’t become good; it becomes certain.