
“But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Page 437 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA437. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. <span class="plainlinks"> 21 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p21– 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22</span>.
"Youth" (1912), II
Context: In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.
“But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
This quote has been attributed to Hesiod on the internet, and even published with citation as a dubious attribution, but there are no known occurrences of it in his writings.
Misattributed
Source: As quoted in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, William L. Shirer, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 1990, p. 249 (May 1, 1937)
Speech on May 1, 1937, quoted in John S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-45 (New York, NY, Basic Books, 1968), p. 178
1930s
Twitter post, https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1076909133255852032 (23 December 2018)
Twitter Quotes (2018)
“The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.”
Lord Illingworth, Act I
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
Page 438 https://books.google.com/books?id=-F8wAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA438. Quote republished in " Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/," Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. <span class="plainlinks"> 22 http://alexpeak.com/twr/lar/1/1/2/#p22</span>.
"Youth" (1912), II
Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories
Don Alvarez in Act IV, Scene 1.
Alzira: A Tragedy (1736)
Context: Youth is ever apt to judge in haste,
And lose the medium in the wild extreme,
Do not repent, but regulate your passion:
Though love is reason, its excess is rage.
Give me, at least, your promise to reflect,
In cool, impartial solitude, and still.
No last decision till we meet again.