quotations about youth
Youth holds no society with grief.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
OSCAR WILDE
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Our desire for youth isn't just a fear of dying; it's the desire to keep a life worth living, and for us, that means immortality is not merely living to 150. It means living to 150, perpetually age 30.
FARAH MOHAMMED
"Marketing Immortality", JSTOR Daily, February 2, 2017
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
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Fond youth, give o'er,
And vex thy soul no more
In seeking what were better far unfound;
Alas! thy gains
Are only present pains
To gather scorpions for a future wound.
FRANCIS QUARLES
Emblems
The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit should never be lost.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness, are like the days of spring; instead of complaining of their brevity try to enjoy them.
RUCKERT
attributed, Treasury of Thought: Forming an Encyclopedia of Quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors
What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
MARY KARR
Lit
Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men, is more lively than that of old; and imaginations stream into their minds better, and, as it were, more divinely.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Youth and Age", Essays; or Counsels Civil and Moral
There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth--are something better than youth.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Youth's follies are soon forgot.
ALBRECHT VON WALLENSTEIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
The retrospect on youth is too often like looking back on what was a fair and promising country, but is now desolated by an overwhelming torrent, from which we have just escaped. Or it is like visiting the grave of a friend whom we had injured, and are precluded by his death from the possibility of making him an atonement.
JOHN FOSTER
John Foster: Life and Thoughts
In youth, prepare for manhood.
L. MURRAY
attributed, Day's Collacon
The pleasure and sadness of youth is that the speed of its passing is never thought about; and so you say that you will do this or that in a year, in five years, only to wake up one morning to realize that what you thought was infinitely prolonged has ended.
DEREK TANGYE
The Way to Minak
Youth is an emblem of heaven; there alone its bloom is eternal.
F. VALENTYN
attributed, Day's Collacon
It must be a very weary day to the youth when he first discovers that, after all, he will only become a man.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;
But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:
Discolour'd sickness, anxious labour, come,
And age, and death's inexorable doom.
VIRGIL
Georgics
The magnet does not more surely and powerfully attract the needle, than youth by some electric sympathy of soul is attracted by youth.
ROBERT SHELTON MACKENZIE
Titian: A Romance of Venice
There may be no fool like an old fool, but our observation has been that the young fool runs him a pretty close second.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
With adolescent egotism and a lot of money one can pretty much rule the world.
GLEN DUNCAN
I, Lucifer