[Ads-l] "old too soon, wise too late"

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Mon Sep 7 18:32:40 UTC 2015


When I was growing up in the 40s and 50s my parents had a stein, quite possibly from Pennsylvania "Dutch" country, with the legend 

VE(E) GET TOO SOON OLDT UND TOO LATE SCHMARDT

or some such faux-German orthography.  

LH

> On Sep 7, 2015, at 11:51 AM, Joel Berson <berson at ATT.NET> wrote:
> 
> Isn't it "too soon old, too late wise"?
> 
> In Google Web, I'm wrong by almost 3 to 1.  (In GBooks, there are too few hits for either to be meaningful, about a dozen each.)
> 
> So, quote detectives -- who said it first, and in which form?  (Confucius?)
> 
> Joel
> 
>      From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
> Sent: Sunday, September 6, 2015 8:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Adage: Youth is wasted on the young (George Bernard Shaw variant April 22, 1931)
> 
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 2:38 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com
>> wrote:
> 
>> As George Bernard once exclaimed, it seems a
>> shame to waste it on children.
>> 
> 
> However he expressed it, it's the sad truth: old too soon, wise too late.
> ;-(
> 
> So, before he turned to discovering football talent, Lou Holz  was
> discovering Broadway talent. And "comic paper dialect" = "comic-paper
> [funny-paper] dialect," no doubt.
> 
> 
> -- 
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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