In his lecture ›Altern als Problem für Künstler‹ (Ageing as a Problem for Artists; 1954), Gottfried Benn recounts that he came across the following remark by Edward Burne-Jones in a work on art history:

»Our first fifty years pass in great errors; then we become fearful and can scarcely put one foot in front of the other, so well do we know our own weakness. Then twenty years of toil, and now we begin to understand what we can do and what we must leave undone. And then comes a ray of hope and a blast of the trumpet, and we must depart this earth.«