Quotes about youth
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“Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living - or that either can be fatal?”

Erich Segal book The Class

Source: The Class

Life

“It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter "Formerly, 2"

Thinking

“My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots?
Everybody has roots.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXXII : Comparisons: Information Rejected; Helen to Milicent

Life, Truth, World, Idea

“Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about. The trick is to grow up without getting old.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

“On with the dance! let joy be unconfin'd;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the Glowing Hours with Flying feet.”

George Gordon Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Source: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

Pleasure, Sleep, Joy, Dance

“In adolescence she thought it was too early to choose, now in youth she was convinced it was too late to change.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Change

“Laws for the liberal education of youth, especially of the lower class of people, are so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1770s, Thoughts on Government (1776)

People, Education, Law

“I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Knowledge, Loss

“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.”

Jean Genet (1910–1986) French novelist, playwright, poet and political activist

Dreams

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 3
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

Men, Sadness, Thinking, Despair

“It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, and Other Stories

Imagination, Future

“I envied these women I saw before me, their beauty still intact. Life has its revenge of life. Untimely death is the secret of eternal youth.”

Shan Sa book Empress

Source: Empress

Life, Death, Women, Secret

“Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.”

Dave Eggers book What Is the What

Source: What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006), Ch. 10, p. 110
Source: What Is the What

Pain, Shoe, Boy

“They always prided themselves on looking youthful. “Forty’s the new thirty,” they’d joke.
Until heartbreak and grief enter your life, and then forty’s the new one hundred.”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: The Piper's Son

Life

“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

Age, Hell, Perfection

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

Source: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature

Love, Failure, Memory

“Smiling with pleasure, they went through their memories, not sad, old people's memories, but poetic, youthful ones, those impressions from the very distant past where dream merges with reality, and they laughed softly, rejoicing at something.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

People, Pleasure, Sadness, Smile

“In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.”

Yann Martel (1963) Canadian author best known for the book Life of Pi

Women, Men, Teachers

“My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ

Joy

“Youth is still where you left it, and that's where it should stay. Anything that was worth taking on life's journey, you'll already have taken with you.”

Sophie Kinsella book Wedding Night

Source: Wedding Night

Life

“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Future

“Your Grandpa was a boxer in his youth. Sexiest thing I'd ever seen, let me tell you. He wore these short little shorts, and was always dripping in sweat." There goes my appetite.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

“A nation becomes what its young people read in their youth. Its ideals are fashioned then, its goals strongly determined.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

People, Fashion, Reading

“Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

Age

“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Life

“The time comes when each of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow-men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”

Sigmund Freud book Civilization and Its Discontents

Source: Civilization and Its Discontents

Life, Men, Pain, Learning

“Belief in one’s identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one’s immortality…and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 3 (p. 186)

Pain

“There is no greater indication of youth, perhaps, than the desire for everything to be as it should.”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

“In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Love

“There are two words that you should use frequently in your youth: ´sorry´ and ´thank-you´. Use the first one as often as possible, so that on your death bed all that you have to say to your friends is ´thank-you!´.”

Robin Jones Gunn (1955) American writer

Death

“Youth calls to age across the tired years: 'What have you found,' he cries, 'what have you sought?" 'What have you found,' age answers through his tears, 'What have you sought.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Source: The Poems of Dylan Thomas

Age, Tear

“His voice stopped and they looked for a long quiet moment into each other's eyes and between them lay the sunny lost youth that they had so unthinkingly shared.”

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) American author and journalist

“Youth is the only sexy tragedy. It's James Dean jumping into his Porsche Spyder, it's Marilyn heading off to bed.”

Michael Cunningham book By Nightfall

Source: By Nightfall

“This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Life, World, Imagination, Courage

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Self-Portrait" (1936), p. 5 http://books.google.com/books?id=Q1UxYzuI2oQC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s, Out of My Later Years (1950) Variant: I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Pain, Solitude

“Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

“To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Beauty, Freedom, Indecision

“How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three (1631)

Time

“Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

Happiness, Age, Hope, Time

“I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Dreams, Feeling, Star

“We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. […] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: The Guide for the Perplexed

Nature

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Nature, Learning

“You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasures, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed.”

Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War

Source: The 33 Strategies of War

Pleasure, Thinking

“In youth there are always two forces fighting in people. The warm unthinking little animal struggles against the thing that reflects and remembers”

Sherwood Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio

Source: Winesburg, Ohio

People, Animals, Fight

“It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Life, Despair

“There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.”

Glen Cook book The White Rose

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 2, “The Plain of Fear” (p. 456)
Context: An old, tired man. That is what I am. What became of the old fire, drive, ambition? There were dreams once upon a time, dreams now all but forgotten. On sad days I dust them off and fondle them nostalgically, with a patronizing wonder at the naivete of the youth who dreamed them.

Sadness, Dreams, Time

“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

Heart

“Youthfulness is not determined by age. It is determined by one's life force. One who possesses hope is forever young. One who continually advances is forever beautiful.”

Daisaku Ikeda (1928) Japanese writer

Life, Age, Beauty, Hope

“youth is a marvelous garment”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

Source: The Bell

“As the expression goes, we spend our youth attaining wealth, and our wealth attaining youth.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Source: Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Wealth

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Children, Parent, Help, Childhood

“I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

People, Freedom, Time, Joy

“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

July 14, 1852
Journals (1838-1859)

Age

“For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

St. 25. Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875) Source: The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Age, Star

“American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Age

“It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one's youth.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“My reasoning, if one can call it that, was inflamed by the scatter shot passions of youth and a literary diet overly rich in the works of Nietzshe, Kerouac, and John Menlove Edwards…”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Passion

“A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Source: The Life and Wisdom of Confucius

Future

“Let your youth have free reign, it won't come again, so be bold and no repenting.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

“You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthfulness in you that no one will be able to take away from you.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Feeling, Soul

“Aging is not 'lost youth' but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) American activist

Age, Powerful

“Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.”

Mark Z. Danielewski (1965) Novelist

Learning

“For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!”

Walt Whitman book Fulles d'herba

Source: Leaves of Grass

Dependency

“Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Love, Happiness

“Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Thinking

“For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 3.
Source: Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798), Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Context: That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Sadness, Music, Nature, Learning

“Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

“Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Phrixus, Frag. 927

Learning, Past, Future, Dead

“If youth is a defect, it is one that we outgrow too soon.”

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) Poet

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Youth is quick in feeling but weak in judgement.”

Homér Ancient Greek epic poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey

Feeling

“You know what I think? I think that if a young woman doesn't engage in the act of occasionally wishing on a star or a flower or a birthday cake full of candles, then we're forfeiting one of the sweetest whimsies of our youth.”

Robin Jones Gunn (1955) American writer

Source: On a Whim

Star, Flowers, Birthday, Thinking

“So of course time is necessary. But nevertheless damn painful, for it transforms all the pieces of your life - joy and sorrow, youth and age, love and hate, terror and bliss - from fire into smoke rising up the air and dissipating on a breeze.”

Charles Frazier (1950) American writer

Love, Life, Pain, Hate

“How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part.”

Michael Ondaatje book Divisadero

Source: Divisadero

Way, Thinking, Universe, Parting

“It is not the terrible occurrences that no one is spared, — a husband’s death, the moral ruin of a beloved child, long, torturing illness, or the shattering of a fondly nourished hope, — it is none of these that undermine the woman’s health and strength, but the little daily recurring, body and soul devouring care s. How many millions of good housewives have cooked and scrubbed their love of life away! How many have sacrificed their rosy checks and their dimples in domestic service, until they became wrinkled, withered, broken mummies. The everlasting question: ‘what shall I cook today,’ the ever recurring necessity of sweeping and dusting and scrubbing and dish-washing, is the steadily falling drop that slowly but surely wears out her body and mind. The cooking stove is the place where accounts are sadly balanced between income and expense, and where the most oppressing observations are made concerning the increased cost of living and the growing difficulty in making both ends meet. Upon the flaming altar where the pots are boiling, youth and freedom from care, beauty and light-heartedness are being sacrificed. In the old cook whose eyes are dim and whose back is bent with toil, no one would recognize the blushing bride of yore, beautiful, merry and modestly coquettish in the finery of her bridal garb.”

Dagobert von Gerhardt (1831–1910) German writer

To the ancients the hearth was sacred; beside the hearth they erected their lares and household-gods. Let us also hold the hearth sacred, where the conscientious German housewife slowly sacrifices her life, to keep the home comfortable, the table well supplied, and the family healthy."
"von Gerhardt, using the pen-name Gerhard von Amyntor in", A Commentary to the Book of Life. Quote taken from August Bebel, Woman and Socialism, Chapter X. Marriage as a Means of Support.

Love, Life, Death, God

“"Eh, Manuel, and will you re-model the world?"
"Who knows?" says Manuel, in the high pride of his youth. "At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered."”

James Branch Cabell book Figures of Earth

Naifer and Manuel, in Ch. II : Niafer
Figures of Earth (1921)

World

“Youth is wholly experimental.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Letter to a Young Gentleman http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stevenson/robert_louis/s848ce/s848ce22.html Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).

“Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled.”

Greil Marcus (1945) American historian

Lipstick Traces : A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), p. 11.

Future

“Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show,
We may our ends by our beginnings know.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

Of Prudence, line 225.

Age

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2010s

Women, Men, Justice, Thinking

“If we don't speak up, our voices won't be heard in the international community. Even if the decision cannot be changed (Taichung's East Asian Youth Games host city revocation), we need to get more people to understand the truth.”

Lin Chia-lung (1964) Taiwanese politician

Lin Chia-lung (2018) cited in " Taiwan must speak out against China's suppression: Taichung mayor http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aall/201807300034.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 30 July 2018

People, Truth, Game, Communication

“I am heartbroken to say that the youth of the country doesn’t deserve us. I am here to hear who has a word of solace and point of solution of the problems that the nation is facing. Is it only votes that matter? Is it just us and them? Are we not simplifying matters by breaking up the country in two parts—us and them?”

Tathagata Satpathy (1956) Indian politician

In a Lok Sabha speech, on the death of Rohith Vemula and the JNU sedition debate, as quoted in " Stormy debate deepens divide in Parliament http://www.livemint.com/Politics/NcrHnh4YEodDfCn036LcxM/Stormy-debate-deepens-divide-in-Parliament.html" Live Mint (25 February 2015)

Problem, Parting, Country