Aging & Wisdom Quote by Logan Pearsall Smith

Aging, in Logan Pearsall Smith's hands, doesn’t polish the soul; it armors it. The line opens with a familiar trade-off - the body deteriorates while character supposedly firms up - then twists the knife: that moral stoutness may be less virtue than thickened skin. He’s not celebrating wisdom so much as diagnosing a convenient hardening, the way repetition turns transgression into routine.

Smith was a critic of manners, and the sentence moves like a miniature social history of the respectable classes. "Morally stouter" sounds like Victorian self-help until the payoff lands: we learn to "throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once". That image does double work. Chill suggests something physical, involuntary, an ethical shiver that should linger. Throwing it off is a practiced gesture - like shrugging into a coat and leaving the room before anyone can ask questions. Conscience becomes weather: uncomfortable, external, easily managed.

The intent is quietly accusatory. He’s observing how people age into their rationalizations, how time doesn’t only teach us empathy but also teaches us defenses: the internal PR, the selective memory, the comforting story that necessity made us do it. The subtext is that society mistakes numbness for strength. What looks like moral stamina may simply be reduced sensitivity, a diminished capacity to feel implicated.

Written in an era steeped in propriety and performance, the line reads as a warning about adulthood’s most under-discussed skill: not learning right from wrong, but learning how fast you can stop caring.