Why Grow Old?

It is an insult to your Creator that your brain should begin to ossify, that your mental powers should begin to decline when you have only reached the half-century milestone. You ought then to be in your youth. What has the appearance of old age to do with youth? What have gray hair, wrinkles, and other evidences of age to do with youth? Mental power should constantly increase. There should be no decline in years. Increasing wisdom and power should be the only signs that you have lived long, that you have been many years on this planet. Strength, beauty, magnificence, superiority, not weakness, uselessness, decrepitude, should characterize a man who has lived long.

As long as you hold the conviction that you are sixty, you will look it. Your thought will out-picture itself in your face, in your whole appearance. If you hold the old-age ideal, the old-age conviction, your expression must correspond. The body is the bulletin board of the mind.

On the other hand, if you think of yourself as perpetually young, vigorous, robust, and buoyant, because every cell in the body is constantly being renewed, decrepitude will not get hold of you.