“Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading.”

“Everyone points to the other man, who, according to him, is happier But the only one, who has the courage to declare that he is truly happy, is he who has relinquished all his passions and hungers from within.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

“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

“Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

“His kisses were gifts. He kissed with everything he had, with power and passion and hunger and love. He held nothing back, giving everything, exposing everything.”

Sylvia Day (1973) American writer

“Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.”

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

“If men and women are to understand each other, to enter into each other's nature with mutual sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation must be laid in youth.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

“He that loves reading has everything within his reach.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

“I know a youth who loves a little maid—
(Hey, but his face is a sight for to see!)
Silent is he, for he's modest and afraid
(Hey, but he's timid as a youth can be!)”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

“Anyone who has read Yeats’s wonderful Autobiography will remember his Sligo—shabby, shadowed, half country and half sea, full of confused romance, superstition, poverty, eccentricity, unrecognized anachronism, passion and ignorance and the little boy’s misery. Yeats was treated well but was bitterly unhappy; he prayed that he would die, and used often to say to himself: “When you are grown up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist