“I dread to come to the end of the year,said a friend to me recently, ”it makes me realize I am growing old.“
“我惧怕临近岁末年尾”，一位朋友最近对我说：“它使我意识到我正在变老。”
William James, the great psychologist, said that most men are ”old fogies at twenty-fiveHe 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 minutea 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.
一个人一旦停止成长--不管他年龄多大--他就开始衰老。反之，真正的伟人从来不会衰老。
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?”
“一个人何时变老？”，从这类事例中对这个问题你已经有了真正的答案。
Laplace at seventy-eight died young. He was still unsatisfied, still sure that he had a lot to learn.
拉普拉斯78岁逝世时依然年轻。他依旧不满足，依旧感到许多东西要学。
As long as a man can keep himself in that attitude of mind, as long as he can look back on every year and say , “I grew,” he is still young.
一个人，只要他能够保持这种心态，只要他在回首过去的一年时能够说“我在成长”，他就依然年轻。
The minute he ceases to grow, the minute he says to himself, “I know all that I need to know,” -- that day youth stops. He may be twenty-five or seventy-five, it makes no difference. On that day he begins to be old.
