Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwin A. Robinson

Youth gets blamed for shortsightedness, but Robinson flips the charge: it sees too far. The line is a small paradox with a built-in stumble, forcing you to feel the mental misstep it describes. “Too far” sounds like ambition, even arrogance; “how near it is” yanks that ambition back into the body, into time, into the practical distance between wanting and arriving. The neat trick is that the error isn’t lack of vision but mismeasuring proximity: youth mistakes the horizon for a destination and doesn’t register how quickly the horizon can move closer.

The subtext is quietly unsentimental. Robinson isn’t romanticizing youth’s “dreams” or scolding its naivete; he’s describing a perceptual distortion that comes with being early in life. When you’re young, the future is vivid enough to feel real, but not yet textured by consequence, compromise, or the slow mathematics of effort. That’s why youth “sees too far”: not because it’s prophetic, but because it can afford to imagine without immediately paying.

Context matters. Robinson wrote in an America turning modern, where “progress” was a civic religion and distance (social, economic, geographic) seemed conquerable. The line reads like a corrective to that national mood: the next stage is closer than you think, and that closeness is both promise and threat. “To seeing farther” lands like an afterimage of experience: the deeper vision of maturity isn’t a new set of eyes, but the earned ability to gauge distance honestly.