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To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think. "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these things are things that cannot inspire envy.
Janie had spent most of the day under a blossoming pear tree in the back-yard. She had been spending every minute that she could steal from her chores under that tree for the last three days. That was to say, ever since the first tiny bloom had opened. It had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously. How? Why? It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep. It connected itself with other vaguely felt matters that had struck her outside observation and buried themselves in her flesh. Now they emerged and quested about her consciousness.
She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation...
Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!
"As we watch the world embrace the Olympics in the coming days,
let us remember why the modern Olympics came into being:
to bring nations closer together, to have the youth of the world
compete in sports, rather than fight in war.
As long as we believe our own war-driven thoughts, there will
always be war, in ourselves, in our families, and in our world.
As long as we believe our thoughts, there will always be war. "
THE MOST AND THE GREATEST
The most destructive habit............Worry
The greates joy.............................Giving
The greatest loss.............Loss of respect
The most dangerous parishioner....A gossiper
The world's most incredible computer.....The Brain
The worst thing to be without..........Hope
The most satisfying work......Helping others
The ugliest personality trait........Selfishness
The most endangered species....Dedicated leaders
The deadliest weapon................The tongue
The most power-filled words..........."I Can"
The greatest asset..............................Faith
The greatest natural resource.....Our youth
The greatest "shot in the arm"...Encouragement
The greatest problem to overcome......Fear
The most worthless emotion........Self-pity
The most beautiful attire.................SMILE!
The most prized possession ........Integrity
The most crippling failure disease...Excuses
The most powerful force in life..........LOVE!
The most contagious spirit.......Enthusiasm
Youth is not a question of years..
Later, it would occur to me it's the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.
If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!
"Young men wish always to dream of what they have lost."
"And old men?"
"Of what they have not found."
Youth is a beautiful dream, on whose brightness books shed a blinding dust. Will ever the day come when the wise link the joy of knowledge to youth's dream? Will ever the day come when Nature becomes the teacher of man, humanity his book and life his school? Youth's joyous purpose cannot be fulfilled until that day comes. Too slow is our march toward spiritual elevation, because we make so little use of youth's ardor.
Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young.
Your son is at five your master, at ten your servant, at fifteen your double, and after that, your friend or foe, depending on his bringing up.
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence.
Joyfulness keeps the heart and face young. A good laugh makes better friends with ourselves and everybody around.
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.
That man(and woman), has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his(or her) body is the ready servant of his(or her) will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
Age is a state of mind.
Youth and age exist only among the ordinary people.
All the more talented and exceptional of us;
are sometimes old,
just as we are sometimes happy,
and sometimes sad.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet CAPABLE of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is - solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
I try to remember life without him and it's like trying to remember an old film I thought I'd seen but perhaps never did. I ask him if he's sorry we didn't find each other when we were young, and he says he would never have recognized me when he was young. And besides, he was too old when he was young, he says.
..."Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives."
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently.
Elderly people and those in authority cannot always be relied upon to take enlightened and comprehending views of what they call the indiscretions of youth.
A youth to whom was given So much of earth, so much of heaven.
"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So it was when my life began; So it is now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream, It is not now as it hath been of yore ;- Turn whereso'er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more. . . . . But yet I know, where'er I go, That there hath past away a glory from the earth. . . . . Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, And sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough, along the mountain-side. By our own spirits we are deified; We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
