Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Moore

A lifetime plotted like a pension schedule: that is the sly charm here. Moore sketches an ideal education not as a burst of youthful brilliance but as a long, disciplined climb with clearly marked stations. “Study until twenty-five” grants youth its proper task: absorb, train, build the mind’s muscles. “Investigation until forty” shifts the emphasis from receiving knowledge to testing it, a subtle argument that real intellectual authority arrives only after you’ve learned to doubt your own schooling. Then comes “profession until sixty,” where thought is forced to cash out in public life. The mind, in Moore’s model, isn’t meant to stay a private ornament; it should be made useful.

The kicker is the last clause, and it’s where Moore’s poet’s cynicism peeks through. “At which age I would have him retired on a double allowance” sounds benevolent, even enlightened, but it’s also a jab at the way societies reward “wisdom”: not with freedom to keep thinking, but with a tidy exit and a stipend. The double allowance is both carrot and comic exaggeration, as if to admit that no rational person would volunteer for six decades of self-improvement without hazard pay.

Context matters: Moore is writing in an era when formal education was narrow, class-coded, and often treated as a finishing polish for gentlemen rather than a civic necessity. His timeline argues for something closer to a modern career of learning, while smuggling in a warning: institutions love “experienced” people most when they’re safely out of the way.