Aging & Wisdom Quote by Petrarch

Petrarch’s line isn’t a gentle generational observation; it’s a neat little sting aimed at desire itself. The aged, he suggests, don’t merely prefer “what is practical” because their bodies slow down or their calendars fill up. They love practicality. That verb choice matters: practicality becomes an object of affection, almost a moral attachment formed by repetition, loss, and the long accounting of consequences. Meanwhile youth doesn’t just like “what is dazzling”; it “longs only” for it. The word “only” makes the appetite monomaniacal, a tunnel vision that feels romantic in the moment and ridiculous in retrospect.

As a 14th-century poet straddling medieval piety and early humanist self-scrutiny, Petrarch is writing in a culture that prized restraint but was newly fascinated by inner life. He’s famous for turning the self into a stage where conflicting impulses perform: aspiration vs. appetite, virtue vs. vanity, eternity vs. the glitter of the present. This epigram compresses that drama into an age-based contrast, but the subtext is less about chronology than about training: time tutors you into practicality the way dazzlement tutors you into disappointment.

There’s also a rhetorical trapdoor here. “Dazzling” isn’t condemned outright; it’s described in the language of spectacle, a force that overwhelms the senses. Petrarch knows how beauty works on a person because his poetry runs on that charge. The line’s bite comes from self-implication: the poet chastises youthful longing while admitting how intoxicating it is, and how thoroughly it can organize a life.