To one bent on age, death will come as a release. I feel this quite strongly now that I have grown old myself and have come to regard death like an old debt, at long last to be discharged.
If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!
There is sense in hoping for recognition in a distant future only when we take it for granted that mankind will remain essentially unchanged, and that whatever is great is not for one age only but will be looked upon as great for all time.
I like my buddies from west Texas. I liked them when I was young; I liked them when I was middle-age; I liked them before I was President; and I like them during President; and I like them after President.
I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. - Tithonus