Aging & Wisdom Quote by Edward Young

Young is skewering a familiar species: the prestige-hunter who mistakes citation for insight and repetition for permanence. The couplet lands because it exposes vanity in its most bureaucratic costume. "Renown" is the real appetite; "scraps of learning" is the meager diet that supposedly feeds it. He doesn’t attack learning itself so much as the transactional version of it, where knowledge becomes a prop and reading is reduced to scavenging for quotable bits.

The verb "dote" does a lot of quiet damage. It suggests fussy, uncritical affection - a kind of besotted hoarding - and implies that what’s being adored is not wisdom but the appearance of being wise. Then Young sharpens the blade with "think": immortality here is not earned, it’s imagined. Quoting, in this worldview, becomes a cheap technology of self-extension. If I repeat the right names, I can borrow their aura; if I circulate their lines, I can smuggle myself into the archive.

Context matters. Writing in the 18th-century world of coffeehouses, pamphlets, and salon culture, Young watched reputation become a social currency, minted through display and performance. His larger moral project (think Night Thoughts) is obsessed with mortality and the delusions we use to dodge it. The couplet’s sting is that it treats "immortal" as a status symbol rather than a metaphysical question. Young’s subtext is blunt: you can stack quotations like trophies, but they won’t save you from obscurity - or from death. The only immortality that counts comes from making something.