Albert Bigelow Paine

“ Hutton, in Princeton, you said:
"If a man is a pessimist before he is forty-eight, he knows too much. If he is an optimist after he is forty-eight, he knows too little."
Now we know you are an optimist, and nobody would dare to accuse one on the "seven-terraced summit" of knowing little. So probably you are not seventy, after all, but only forty-seven!
Helen Keller was right. Mark Twain was never a pessimist in his heart. ”

“ You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling's military phrase: you have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but "lights out." You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline, if you prefer—and without prejudice—for they are not legally collectable. ”

“ If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late homecomings from the banquet and the lights and laughter, through the deserted streets—a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more—if you shrink at the thought of these things you need only reply, "Your invitation honors me and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy ”