"The weakness of my young friend’s case lay, I thought, in the fact that he not only undervalued experience, but that he evidently did not believe that experience could have anything to say to him. With the swift insight of youth, he had discounted all that, and growing older appeared to him to be a mere stiffening and hardening of prejudices. Where he seemed to me to fail was in an appreciation of tender, simple, wistful things; as I grow older I feel the pathetic charm of life, its hints, its sorrow, its silence, its infinite dreams, its darkening horizon, more and more acutely. Of all this he was impatient. His ideal was to rejoice in his strength; he loved, I felt, the sparking facets of the gem, the dazzling broken reflections, rather than the inner heart of light." 

Arthur C. Benson.