177. Generation Gap
"I am always (said he) on the young people's side, when there is
a dispute between them and the old ones: for at least you have a
chance for virtue till age has withered its very root."
Piozzi: Anecdotes
Link
458. Families; Generation Gap
"Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims
by the credit of their lives. The old man trusts wholly to slow
contrivance and gradual progression: the youth expects to force
his way by genius, vigor, and precipitance. The old man pays
regard to riches, and the youth reverences virtue. The old man
defies prudence: the youth commits himself to magnanimity and
chance. The young man, who intends no ill, believes that none is
intended, and therefore acts with openness and candor; but his
father, having suffered the injuries of fraud, is impelled to
suspect, and too often allured to practice it. Age looks with
anger upon the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the
scrupulosity of age. Thus parents and children, for the greatest
part, live on to love less and less: and if those whom nature
has thus closely united are the torments of each other, where
shall we look for tenderness and consolation?"
Johnson: Rasselas [the princess Nekayah]
Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from
Rasselas.
Link
648. Generation Gap; Old Age
"It has always been the practice of those who are desirous to
believe themselves made venerable by length of time to censure
the new comers into life, for want of respect to gray hairs and
sage experience, for heady confidence in their own
understandings, for hasty conclusions upon partial views, for
disregard of counsels which their fathers and grandfathers are
ready to afford them, and a rebellious impatience of that
subordination to which youth is condemned by nature, as necessary
to its security from evils into which it would be otherwise
precipitated by the rashness of passion and the blindness of
ignorance."
Johnson: Rambler #50 (September 8, 1750)
Link
649. Corruption; Generation Gap; Old
Age
"Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world,
of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation. He
recounts the decency and regularity of former times, and
celebrates the discipline and sobriety of the age in which his
youth was passed; a happy age which is now no more to be
expected, since confusion has broken in upon the world, and
thrown down all the boundaries of civility and reverence."
Johnson: Rambler #50 (September 8, 1750)
Link
776. Generation Gap; Old Age;
Youth
"So different are the colours of life, as we look forward to the
future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions
and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally
produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends
generally with contempt or pity on either side. To a young man
entering the world, with fulness of hope, and ardour of pursuit,
nothing is so unpleasing as the cold caution, the faint
expectations, the scrupulous diffidence which experience and
disappointments certainly infuse; and the old man wonders in his
turn that the world never can grow wiser, that neither precepts
nor testimonies can cure boys of their credulity and sufficiency;
and that not once can be convinced that snares are laid for him,
till he finds himself entangled.
Thus one generation is always the scorn and wonder of the
other, and the notions of the old and young are like liquors of
different gravity and texture which never can unite. The spirits
of youth, sublimed by health and volatized by passion, soon leave
behind them the phlegmatic sediment of weariness and
deliberation, and burst out in temerity and enterprise. The
tenderness, therefore, which nature infuses, and which long
habits of beneficence confirm, is necessary to reconcile such
opposition: and an old man must be a father to bear with
patience those follies and absurdities which he will perpetually
imagine himself to find in the schemes and expectations, the
pleasures and sorrows of those who have not yet been hardened by
time and chilled by frustration."
Johnson: Rambler #69 (November 13, 1750)
Link
1,452. Generation Gap;
Perspective
"This revolution of sentiments occasions a perpetual contest
between the old and young. They who imagine themselves entitled
to veneration by the prerogative of longer life, are inclined to
treat the notions of those whose conduct they superintend with
superciliousness and contempt, for want of considering that the
future and the past have different appearances; that the
disproportion will always be great between expectation and
enjoyment, between new possession and satiety; that the truth of
many maxims of age gives too little pleasure to be allowed till
it is felt; and that the miseries of life would be increased
beyond all human power of endurance if we were to enter the world
with the same opinions as we carry from it."
Johnson: Rambler #196 (February 1, 1752)
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