between enduring life and finding the life that endures.

The wise preacher of long ago caught sight of one of these distinctions
that cut clear through to the roots of things. He says that the sign
of old age is that a man is "afraid of that which is high." When
courage and ambition have gone old age and decrepitude have entered in,
no matter whether a man be eighteen or eighty.

He alone has youth, he alone has life before him, who can still catch
the vision of the ideal, of that which is high, who can lift up his
eyes beyond the horizon of practicabilities and precedents and see the
things not yet realized. There is a time when men must dream dreams
and see visions, when they must feast on noble purposes or die so far
as the inner spirit and all that makes real living is concerned.

If you find the will becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of
the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the
great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the
failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the
less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are
preferred to things high, afar off, and difficult to attain, the heart
is dying already.

Cherish as the spark of life the aspiration to have and do and be the
best. Yet who is there does not know the paralyzing chill that the
sneer of the philistine or even the memory of our own many failures can
give when great possibilities offer themselves to us? How easily enter
in the cold considerations that deaden our aspirations; how subtle the
temptation to be content with the condition that involves neither toil
nor pain. How hard to realize that this is an invitation to death.