Aging & Wisdom Quote by Democritus

Democritus is running a quiet but radical audit on human blame. If the world contains both gifts and disasters, he refuses the comforting story that the disasters are “sent” to us. Good things belong to the gods; what’s “baneful and injurious and useless” is human-made. That division is less theology than moral psychology: it’s an early argument that suffering is often procedural, not fated. People don’t get ruined by cosmic malice; they get ruined by misperception, bad judgment, and the stubborn refusal to learn.

The phrasing “now as of old” does heavy lifting. It’s a jab at our perennial habit of outsourcing responsibility. Across generations, the same impulse repeats: when fortune smiles, we call it providence; when we crash, we call it curse. Democritus flips the script. The gods don’t manufacture our stupidities; we do, and we do them repeatedly. “Stumble” suggests not a single dramatic sin but a series of small missteps, the kind that feel accidental until the pattern becomes undeniable. “Blindness and folly” isn’t just ignorance; it’s willful cognitive laziness, the refusal to see consequences that are plainly attached to actions.

Context matters: Democritus, the atomist, is famous for draining the universe of capricious divine intervention. This line fits that larger project. It keeps the cultural language of gods while smuggling in a secular ethic: if harm isn’t divine policy, then improvement is possible. The subtext is bracingly modern: stop litigating fate; fix your thinking.