When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
--
Samuel Johnson, in a letter to Bennet Langton , published in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), by James BoswellSarah Orne Jewett
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Towering is the confidence of twenty-one.
Samuel Johnson
People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.
William Faulkner
I suspect he was never young, was just born straight forty years old.
Chetan Bhagat
Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.
William Osler
Her handwriting in these pencilled jottings, made forty-five years ago, is exactly as it is today: this makes me suspect, when I am not with her, that she is a closet intellectual.
Helen Garner
Jewett, Sarah Orne
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer
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