Aging & Wisdom Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

Sayers flips the cult of youth on its head with a line that sounds like a riddle and lands like a reprimand. The apparent paradox is the point: “believe in youth” isn’t admiration for the young so much as nostalgia for our own. Youth becomes a backward-facing faith, a romantic investment in beginnings, freshness, potential - all the things we can most easily project onto the past because the past is safely sealed. You can idealize it without having to test it.

Then comes the sharper turn: “to look forward we must believe in age.” Sayers isn’t merely defending older people against insult; she’s arguing that the future depends on continuity, not novelty. “Belief in age” means confidence in accumulated judgment, in institutions that outlast moods, in the competence to steward consequences. It’s a rebuke to the modern habit of treating time like a conveyor belt where the new automatically beats the old. If you genuinely care about tomorrow, you need elders, experience, memory, and the unglamorous discipline of seeing projects through.

The context matters. Writing in the early-to-mid 20th century, Sayers watched a civilization break itself twice, then attempt to rebuild amid mass propaganda and “new” political religions. In that world, youth movements weren’t just cultural decoration; they were political instruments. Her sentence quietly warns that worshipping youth can be an escape from responsibility. Believing in age is believing that the future requires grown-up virtues: patience, restraint, and the courage to be unfashionable.