“I dread to come 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 accumulated the little stock of prejudices that they call their 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 begins 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; Gladstone took up a new language when he was seventy.
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?”
Laplace at seventy-eight died young. He was still unsatisfied, still sure that he had a lot to learn.
我很擔心，一年又將過去了。
「我很擔心，一年又將過去了，這使我覺得又大一年了。」最近，一個朋友對我這樣說。
有一位著名的心理學家曾經說過：「好些人在二十五歲時便已達到衰朽的年齡。」
他是對的，不少人在二十五歲時便滿足於他目前的工作，他們故步自封，拒絕別人的意見，他們是停止向上發展的了。
當一個人停止求進步的時候，無論他的年齡是多少歲，他也可算是開始衰老了。
在另一方面來說，真正的偉大人物是永不衰老的。
歌德是在八十三歲逝世的，但在逝世前早幾年還完成了他的巨著浮士德。英國一位叫做格列史東的大政治家在七十歲那一年，還在學習一種外國文字哩！
法國天文學家拉柏斯，當他將逝世時，仍堅持要工作。他享年七十八歲，在彌留的剎那間還叫道：「我們知道得太少，不知道的反而太多！」
從上述各事例你可以看出什麼時候是人的衰朽的真正答案了。
拉柏斯七十八歲去世時，他還可以說是年青的，因為他沒有滿足，因為他仍渴望學到許多事物。
文章定位：
