ULLMAN Samuel 1840-1924 (poète et homme d'affaires)

Poète et homme d'affaires américain.

Il est aujourd'hui principalement connu pour son poème Youth * qui était le favori du général Douglas MacArthur, et notamment accroché sur le mur de son bureau à Tokyo quand il est devenu commandant suprême des forces alliées au Japon.

Samuel Ulman : plus jeune à gauche...
... moins jeune à droite

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.

When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.