Source identified1
Image design Lavender
Read & copy
“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.