At thirty, a man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.

This passage is from Edward Young’s long, meditative poem *The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality* (commonly *Night Thoughts*), a major mid‑18th‑century work of moral and religious reflection. Young, an Anglican clergyman, wrote the poem in the wake of personal bereavements and amid a culture preoccupied with mortality, self-scrutiny, and the proper use of time. The lines occur in a section that satirizes human procrastination and self-deception: people repeatedly recognize their faults and vow reform as they age, yet habit and delay carry them to the grave unchanged.

Young compresses an entire moral biography into a grim ladder of decades. Each age brings sharper self-knowledge—suspicion at thirty, certainty at forty, remorse at fifty—yet the insight does not translate into action. The repeated “resolves, and re-resolves” mocks the comforting theater of good intentions: resolution becomes a substitute for reform, a way to feel virtuous without changing. The final clause, “then dies the same,” delivers the poem’s memento mori and its ethical sting: time is finite, and character is shaped (or misshaped) by what one actually does, not by what one repeatedly plans to do.