I Dread of Ceasing to Grow
“I dread to come to the end of the year,” said a friend to me recently;” it makes me realize I am growing old.”
A great psychologist said that most men are “old fogies at twenty-five.”
He was right. Most men at twenty-five are satisfied with their jobs. They have accumulate the little stock of prejudices that they called ”principles” and closed their minds to all new ideas; they have ceased to grow.
The minute a man ceases to grow,—no matter what his years,—that minute he begin to be old.
On the other hand, the really great man never grows old.
Goethe passed out at eighty-three, and finished his “Faust” only a few years earlier;
Laplace, the astronomer, was still at work when death caught up with him at seventy-eight. He died crying, “What we know is nothing; what we do not know is immense.”
And there you have the real answer to the question, “When is a man old?”