“Nothing is more disgraceful than that an old man should have nothing to show to prove that he has lived long, except his years.”

GETTING along in years does not mean let?ting go–it means a man’s grip is stronger, his judgment clearer and his experience a mirror in which he can look and forecast the future.

By the time a man is fifty years old he has re?duced his requirements for traveling through life to “a few strong instincts and a few plain rules.”

He has learned that he cannot sit down by the wayside to rest. He must go on and on; no matter how far he has already come; no matter how few companions are left of the company who started out foot to foot with him.

A man does his best work after forty.

During the seven years after he was forty, Shakespeare wrote the most and greatest of his plays.

Caesar was forty-four when he began his dazz?ling military career.

Titian, the artist whom all the world regards with awe and admiration, lived almost a century and did his best work in his later years.

Tennyson published his great poem, “Crossing the Bar,'’ at the age of eighty-one. And Socrates, the greatest philosopher who ever lived, uttered more thoughts and more brilliant thoughts and produced more profound philosophic utterances as he neared his death at seventy years.

Gladstone took up the study of a new language when he was seventy, and was the leader of his party until he was eighty-four when he indulged himself by believing he had earned the right to spend the remainder of his life in the studies he loved.

Virgil, the poet who gave us the AEneid, the noblest poetical composition that has ever been written, did this everlasting work after he had passed forty. His work previous to that time was of a lesser quality.

Clemenceau, the Premier, when called back to guide the political destinies of France, was seventy-eight years old and as the number of his years grows greater, so does his strength of mind and clearness of vision.

Lincoln was fifty-one when he became President, when he flowered into his genius. Before that he was a lawyer, an able lawyer, but only unfolding the talents which in his middle age would save his Country.

No man knows how great he can be, nor what he can do, until ho has lived his three-score-and-ten. There are today shrewd business men who are now putting away the cash they intend to rely upon later in life, when their judgment and experi?ence are ripe, so they can then have leisure (with?out having to scramble for money) to devote their fully developed minds and abilities to some study or pursuit which they are fond of, but which they have no time to engage in now–now, while they must make money and lay money away.

“For age is opportunity no less than youth itself though in another
dress.”

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