Aging & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Ullman

Ullman is selling a defiant idea of aging that flatters the reader into moral agency: time doesn’t defeat you, you collaborate with it. The line pivots on a neat reversal - “living a number of years” is downgraded to arithmetic, while “deserting our ideals” is framed as an active betrayal. “Deserting” is the master verb here. It drags the sentence out of the realm of biology and into ethics, suggesting that getting old is less a fate than a kind of quiet treason against your own earlier convictions.

The craftsmanship is bluntly effective because it pairs the unavoidable with the optional. Wrinkles happen; surrender doesn’t have to. The skin/soul contrast is almost sermon-simple, but it works because it gives people a vocabulary for a fear that’s hard to admit: not death, but diminishment. “Enthusiasm” reads today as a lightweight word, yet Ullman treats it like a spiritual muscle. Lose it, and the inner self creases, stiffens, calcifies.

Context matters. Ullman, an immigrant businessman turned poet writing in an era obsessed with industrial progress and respectable adulthood, offers a counter-myth to Victorian stodginess: youth as a posture, not a birthday. The quote also anticipates the 20th century’s self-help gospel, but with an older moral backbone. Ideals aren’t hobbies; they’re the scaffolding that keeps a person upright. The subtext is both comforting and accusatory: if you feel old, check what you’ve abandoned.