Neither mental nor manual labour is incompatible with longevity, except the one is maintained at the expense of the other.
Sophocles, the greatest tragic poet of Greece, wrote dramas for 60 years and is said to have recited his own poems in public at 88 years of age.
Plato ceased his labour at 80.
Socrates in the fullness of his strength drank the cruel hemlock at 70.
Sir Isaac Newton worked on with unabated zeal to the last, 85.
Goethe lived 83 vigorous to life’s close.
Alexander Von Humboldt, the colossal figure of Germany in the first half of the past century, paused not in a gigantic toil till the cycle of 90 years was complete.
Washington Irving – 77
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Henceforth the least thing shall speak to you words of deliverance, the commonest shall please you best.
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Would you to whom in the early morning I come kissing on the lips to leave Happiness for your waking, would you at last look me in the face?
Have you doubted?—It is well. But now you shall forget your doubts.
Have you suffered? – It is good to suffer; but soon you shall suffer no longer.
Have you looked at the sky and the earth and the long busy streets and thought them dead to all poetry and beauty? – It is you have been ill, nigh to death, but be at peace; life must surely return to you,
O Scientist, what is the use of making a list of things in the house and skipping the house that supports them.
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I moisten the roots of all that has grown. I step up to say that what we do is right and what we affirm is right – and some is only the ore of right.
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I am superior to none and inferior to none.
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Feeling yourself to be one with Nature and identical with the All, jump right in the midst of the struggle.
Individual success or failure will (or should) concern only the bystanders, you will work as nature works impersonally (and that is life).
If your struggle does not bring about your individual progress, it will surety advance those who have entered the arena with you as competitors and their Evolution is your Evolution.
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No joy over victory, no grief over defeat.
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Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively, definite coherent heterogeneity.