Aging & Wisdom Quote by George MacDonald

There is a gentle menace tucked inside MacDonald's velvet phrasing: lose sympathy with the young and you are not merely out of touch; you are, in a moral sense, finished. The line works because it refuses the modern escape hatch of “kids these days” as harmless grousing. For MacDonald, sympathy isn’t a soft feeling but a spiritual faculty, the organ that keeps a person permeable to change, need, and future-facing possibility.

The subtext is an indictment of adulthood’s most convenient sin: converting experience into certainty. “Out of sympathy” doesn’t mean disagreement with youth culture; it means failing to imaginatively enter the young person’s fears and hungers, treating their intensity as melodrama rather than real weather. MacDonald frames that failure as a kind of death-in-life. Your “work” isn’t your job, it’s your human task: to nurture, to translate wisdom without freezing it into law, to make room for the next generation to be different without punishing them for it.

Context matters. MacDonald was a Victorian-era Christian novelist and minister whose fiction leaned toward moral imagination and childlike wonder (influencing later writers like C.S. Lewis). In an age that prized respectability and rigid social roles, he casts the young as a moral barometer. Sympathy with them becomes proof that your heart hasn’t calcified into mere authority. It’s also quietly self-directed: a warning that the moment you stop trying to understand the young, you’ve chosen comfort over growth, and called it maturity.