Aging & Wisdom Quote by Andre Gide

Gide turns the body into a moral weather report: hands as proof of time, desire, and the quiet violence of social expectation. The first move is deliberately abrasive. “Old hands soil… whatever they caress” isn’t just about dirt or age; it’s the insinuation that experience leaves residue, that pleasure carries consequence, that intimacy is never innocent once you’ve lived long enough to know what it costs. Then he pivots, almost tenderly, granting those same hands “beauty” when “joined in prayer.” It’s an image of sanctioned dignity: society can admire the aged body when it performs reverence, renunciation, or piety.

Against that, “young hands” arrive as pure instrument: built for “caresses” and “the sheathing of love,” a phrase that gives sex both warmth and armor. “Sheathing” suggests protection as much as penetration, implying that love is something you enter and something that covers you. Gide’s subtext is sharper: youth is allowed erotic meaning only while it remains private, fleeting, and unburdened by institution.

The sting is in the last line. “It is a pity to make them join too soon” reads like a lament for rushed sanctification: pushing the young into prayer, marriage, duty, or respectability before their bodies have had a chance to be bodies. Coming from Gide - a novelist who wrote against sexual hypocrisy and the suffocation of bourgeois morality - the sentence doubles as critique of how cultures convert desire into obedience. The rhetoric works because it refuses a clean opposition between sacred and sensual; it shows how the “beautiful” posture can also be a kind of theft.