Life & Wisdom Quote by Hervey Allen

Youth gets the sensory fireworks, old age gets the hard-won perspective, and Hervey Allen hands the middle-aged the dubious prize: control. "Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits" flatters its target demographic while quietly needling everyone else. The line works because it treats the senses not as gifts but as assets that can be mismanaged. To have them "in the keeping" of one’s wits suggests custody, stewardship, a kind of internal governance: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell aren’t running the show anymore.

The intent is partly comic, partly corrective. Allen is writing in an era that loved romanticizing youth and treating aging as either tragedy or punchline. He splits the difference. Youth, by implication, has senses untethered from judgment: desire mistaken for truth, novelty for meaning, intensity for depth. Old age, by implication, has wits that may still be there, but the senses are less reliable messengers. Middle age becomes the narrow window where appetite and discernment briefly cooperate.

The subtext is almost moralistic without sounding like a sermon: perception isn’t wisdom until it’s disciplined. Allen’s phrasing also smuggles in a critique of impulsive culture - the idea that being vividly alive is not the same thing as being lucid. In that sense, the quote is less a celebration of middle age than an argument for maturity as sensory literacy: you don’t just feel more accurately; you interpret feeling better.