YOUTH QUOTES
quotations about youth
The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things--and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning.... All their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything; they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to expect it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Fanny McCullough, Dec. 23, 1862
[It] is the juvenal period of life when friendships are formed, and habits established, that will stick by one.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
letter to Alexander Hamilton, Sep. 1, 1796
Figure to yourself what the year would sustain were the spring taken away: such a loss do they sustain who trifle in youth.
LYDIA HOWARD SIGOURNEY
Letters to Young Ladies
The youth is no longer a youth, but a man,
When the first of his dreams is dead.
WILLIAM HERBERT CARRUTH
Ghosts of Dreams
It takes a very long time to become young.
PABLO PICASSO
Saturday Review, 1959
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
"The Diamond as Big as the Ritz"
The whims of youth break all the rules.
HOMER
The Iliad
Age hath its quiet calm, and youth enjoyeth not for haste.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Recollections of early childhood bear comparison to fairy tales, and ... youth remains an unknown country to whose bourn no traveler returns except as the agent of a foreign power.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Fortune's Child", Lapham's Quarterly: Youth
The tempests of youth are mingled with days of brilliant sunshine.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
No one who is young is ever going to be old.
JOHN STEINBECK
East of Eden
Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
Youth is the pollen
That blows through the sky
And does not ask why.
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
John Brown's Body
The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
Sybil
The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
MARK TWAIN
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has; that is why the gods are always young.
ANITA BROOKNER
A Misalliance
I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Youth's the season made for joys,
Love is then our duty.
JOHN GAY
The Beggar's Opera
Only to children children sing,
Only to youth will spring be spring.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The Harp