佚名/Anonymous
“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 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 catch 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，一年又將逝去了，”最近，一個朋友這樣對我說，“這讓我覺得自己又老了一歲。”
曾有一位著名的心理學家說過，很多人“在25歲時就已衰老”。
他說對了，很多人在25歲時就對自己的工作感到滿足。他們積累了一些成見，並把它們當成自己的所謂“原則”；他們思想守舊，拒絕新的觀點；他們已經停止了成長。
當一個人停止成長的時候——無論他的年齡如何——他就已經開始衰老。
從另一方麵來說，真正偉大的人是永不衰老的。
歌德是在83歲逝世的。他在逝世的前幾年，完成了巨著《浮士德》。英國政治家格拉德斯通在70歲那年，還在學習一門新語言。
天文學家拉普拉斯一直堅持工作到78歲。死神來臨時，在彌留的刹那間，他還喊道：“我們知道的何其少，而不知道的又何其多！”