quotations about youth
Time ever mocks all youthful hopes;
He laughs at ever plan youth makes;
He buries fame and honor deep
In grave of hope--too late youth wakes.
ARDELIA COTTON BARTON
"Time's Ravages"
Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
It is the way of youth that each fresh piece of knowledge of life should go to its head, and that once uplifted by an emotion it can never have enough of it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
So tutor youth that the sins of age be not imputed to thee.
PYTHAGORAS
attributed, Day's Collacon
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
I wouldn't say that I dislike the young. I'm simply not a fan of naïveté.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
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
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
Youth is an emblem of heaven; there alone its bloom is eternal.
F. VALENTYN
attributed, Day's Collacon
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 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
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
For youth, everything is sport.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
attributed, Day's Collacon
In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Our faults are apt to assume giant and exaggerated forms to our eyes in youth.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
Every thing is pretty that is young.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Pamela
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
speech at University of Cape Town, South Africa, Jun. 6, 1966
My youth is the foundation of me.
KHALID
"American Teen"
It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
All the Pretty Horses
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