Aging & Wisdom Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Prudence is framed here not as wisdom but as a kind of learned surrender. Buck flips the usual scolding of youth on its head: their ignorance is not a deficit to be corrected, it is the engine that keeps history from hardening into habit. The sentence moves like a neat piece of narrative logic - because they "do not know enough", they "attempt the impossible", and because they attempt it, they sometimes remake the world. That repetition, "generation after generation", widens the claim from a pep talk into a theory of progress: the future advances less through careful planning than through people who haven't yet internalized all the reasons something "can't be done."

The subtext is a quiet indictment of adults and institutions. "Prudent" reads like a compliment, but in Buck's hands it carries the stale odor of gatekeeping: prudence is what power calls itself when it wants things to stay put. Youth, by contrast, is positioned as the disruptive force that exposes how many "impossibilities" are just social agreements enforced by fear, precedent, and exhaustion.

Context matters because Buck wrote across eras when the "impossible" was being loudly renegotiated - women's roles, imperial order, global conflict, mass poverty, the ethics of modernization. As a novelist steeped in cross-cultural observation, she understood that what one society labels unrealistic another treats as obvious. The line is less romantic about young people than it is pragmatic about change: ignorance can be dangerous, but it is also the one resource that isn't already owned by yesterday.