Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jane Austen

Austen is praising prejudice the way a cat praises a bird: with bright eyes and a trap already set. The line flatters “the prejudices of a young mind” as “amiable,” a word that seems to promise harmless quirks and earnest conviction. But Austen’s gift is to make that gentleness feel slightly suspect. “Amiable” becomes a social gloss, the kind of adjective polite people use when they want to admire something they also mean to contain.

The real bite is in the regret: “one is sorry to see them give way.” Not because prejudice is morally defensible, but because its collapse marks the end of a particular kind of youth - the stage where you can believe you’re original simply because you haven’t yet been exposed to contradiction. Austen catches the melancholy of maturation: the moment when private certainty gets replaced by public “general opinions.” That phrase lands with a quiet thud. “General” suggests not wisdom, but consensus; not truth earned, but ideas acquired the way you acquire manners, accents, and acceptable tastes.

Subtextually, she’s describing how society manufactures adults. The young begin with inherited biases (family, class, local myth), and then “improvement” often means swapping those for a more fashionable set, equally unexamined but better credentialed. Austen isn’t romanticizing ignorance; she’s skeptical of the alternative on offer: a worldview made smoother, more socially legible, and therefore easier to mistake for maturity.

Context matters: in Austen’s world, “opinion” is currency, and the education of a mind is inseparable from the grooming of a person. The sentence is a miniature of her broader project - exposing how selfhood gets edited into acceptability.