Youth

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips, and supple knees; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions. It is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite of adventure over the love of ease.

It sometimes exists in a man of fifty more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years; people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite for what comes next, the joy of the game of life. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubts; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

When the wires are all down, and the central place of your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old indeed.