Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

A blade disguised as a shrug: Thackeray’s “I suppose” is doing the real work here, masking a hard social judgment as mild observation. He doesn’t thunder about vice; he lounges into it, as if the conclusion is obvious to anyone with eyes and a drawing-room education. That relaxed tone is a Victorian weapon. It lets him indict entire age groups while keeping his hands clean.

The barb is the symmetry. Youth gets stereotyped as self-absorbed because it’s unfinished, hungry, convinced the world is a mirror. Thackeray’s sharper move is to put “the very old” in the same sentence, implying a return to ego once the future collapses. When time is short, the self becomes urgent again: comfort, attention, legacy, the last word. Selfishness isn’t framed as moral failure so much as a stage of life that society politely excuses or sentimentalizes.

As a novelist of manners, Thackeray is always tracking how “character” gets performed under pressure from money, status, and domestic obligation. This line fits a culture obsessed with propriety and duty, where dependence is embarrassing and need must be dressed up as entitlement. The young demand because they assume; the very old demand because they’ve earned it, or because they fear vanishing.

The sting is that the productive middle - the people doing the caretaking - are implicitly cast as the only ones permitted to be “unselfish,” stuck between two groups allowed to take without apology. Thackeray’s cynicism isn’t about age; it’s about the social stories we tell to justify who gets to be needy.