Abandon Not Your Ideals

WE GROW OLD BY DESERTING OUR IDEALS

Poem by Samuel Ullman

Popularized by Gen. Douglas MacArthur

(Gen. Douglas MacArthur was so inspired by Samuel Ullman’s poem that he popularized it and kept a framed copy in his office while Supreme Allied commander in Japan. He quoted it so often in his speeches that became known as “MacArthur Credo.”)

Youth is not a time of life. It’s a state of mind.

It’s a test of the will, a quality of imagination,

a vigor of emotion, a predominance of courage over timidity

of the appetite for adventure over love of ease.

Nobody grows old by merely 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 quick equivalents of the long years

that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is, in every beings’ heart the love of

wonder, the sweet amazement of the stars, and the star like

things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events,

the unfailing childlike appetite for “What next?”

You are young as your faith, as old as your doubt,

as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear,

as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

So long as your heart receives messages of

beauty, cheer, courage, grandeur and power from

the earth, from man and from the infinite, so long are you young.

When all the wires are down, and all the

central places of your heart are covered with

the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism,

then, and only then, are you grown old indeed,

and may God have mercy on your soul.

Fr. Reynaldo R. Capili, SSS