It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its
wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and
the only gift not given to youth. Youth is preeminently the period in which a
man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man
can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the
power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its
adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that
good wine until now.
-Charles Dickens (1906)
[Have to admit, I find it amusing that when Chesterton published that book, he was only 32, and hence not yet middle-aged himself. lol.]
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