Edward Young Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Edward Young with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
Image design Lavender
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“What then is to be done? Be wise with speed; A fool at forty is a fool indeed.”
Meaning & context
Young’s satirical couplet urges people not to postpone the cultivation of judgment until age has made long-standing folly harder to excuse.
Source details
Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, Satire II, from the seven-satire sequence issued in the 1720s and represented in Project Gutenberg #18827. The couplet belongs to Young’s satirical moral persona; its age-based sting is period rhetoric rather than an empirical claim about people at forty.
Source identified2
Image design Golden Hour
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“Procrastination is the thief of time;”
Meaning & context
Young personifies procrastination as something that steadily steals finite time while people postpone decisions and assume future opportunities will remain available.
Source details
Night Thoughts, Night I. The line appears in Young’s long religious and philosophical poem about mortality, delay and preparation for death; it is poetic moral reflection rather than productivity research.
Source identified3
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“Extremes still fright me, though of love itself.”
Meaning & context
Leonora warns that even an emotion as valued as love can become frightening when it is driven to extremes.
Source details
The Revenge: A Tragedy (1721), represented by Project Gutenberg #30653. Leonora says this to Alonzo after asking him to moderate his thoughts; the surrounding scene includes jealousy, a dagger and threatened violence. The sentence is dramatic character dialogue and is not presented as Young speaking autobiographically or as clinical relationship advice.