Quotes About Youth

We have collected and put the best Quotes About Youth in many categories. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.

May these Quotes About Youth on many subjects inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.

See also: Youth rights and The Spirit Of Youth

Youth is the time of life when one is young, and often means the time between childhood and adulthood (maturity). It is also defined as “the appearance, freshness, vigor, spirit, etc., characteristic of one who is young”. Its definitions of a specific age range varies, as youth is not defined chronologically as a stage that can be tied to specific age ranges; nor can its end point be linked to specific activities, such as taking unpaid work or having sexual relations.

Tiny Giggles
Silly giggles of laughter
I store upon a shelf
I give some to other
I save some for myself
I am rich beyond all measure
Though not with worldly wealth
I store up these treasures
For my heart and soulful health. – Muse

Those who wish to predict a nation’s future can do so accurately by analyzing the education and upbringing given to its young people. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Desires resemble sweets, and virtues resemble food that is a little salty or sour. When young people are free to choose, what are they likely to prefer? Regardless of this, however, it is our obligation to bring them up to be friends of virtue and enemies of indecency and immorality. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Until we help our young people through education, they are captives of their environment. They wander about aimlessly, moved by intense passions and far away from knowledge and reason. They can become truly valiant young representatives of the national thought and feeling only if their education integrates them with their past and prepares them intelligently for their future. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Think of society as a crystal vessel, and of its young people as the liquid poured into it. Notice that the liquid assumes the vessel’s shape and color. Evil-minded champions of regimentation tell young people to obey them instead of the truth. Do such people never question themselves? Should they not also obey the truth? – M. Fethullah Gulen

A nation’s progress or decline depends on the spirit and consciousness, the upbringing and education, given to its young people. Nations that have raised their young people correctly are always ready for progress, while those who have not done so find it impossible to take even a single step forward. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Young people are saplings of power, strength, and intelligence. If trained and educated properly, they can become “heroes” overcoming obstacles and acquire a mind that promises enlightenment to hearts and order to the world. – M. Fethullah Gulen

The future of every individual is closely related to the impressions and influences experienced during childhood and youth. If children and young people are brought up in a climate where their enthusiasm is stimulated with higher feelings, they will have vigorous minds and display good morals and virtues. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Little attention and importance is given to teaching cultural values, although they are essential to education. When we give them their deserved importance, we will have reached a major objective. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Improving a community is possible only by elevating the young generations to the rank of humanity, not by obliterating the bad ones. Unless a seed composed of religion, tradition, and historical consciousness is germinated through­out the country, new evil elements will appear and grow in the place of each eradicated bad one. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Children’s literature, whether prose or verse, must impart resolution to the spirit, soundness to the mind, and strength to hopes so that we may raise generations with strong wills and sound ideas. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Educators who have not been apprenticed to a master and have not received a sound education are like blind people trying to light the way of others with lanterns. A child’s mischief and impudence arises from the atmosphere in which he or she has been raised. A dysfunctional family life is increasingly reflected upon the spirit of the child, and therefore upon the society. – M. Fethullah Gulen

In schools, good manners should be considered just as important as other subjects. If they are not, how can children grow up with sound characters? Education is different from teaching. Most people can be teachers, but the number of educators is severely limited. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Good manners are a virtue and are greatly appreciated in whomever they are found. Those with good manners are liked, even if they are uneducated. Communities devoid of culture and education are like rude individuals, for one cannot find in them any loyalty in friendship or consistency in enmity. Those who trust such people are always disappointed, and those who depend upon them are left, sooner or later, without support. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Although it is fundamental that girls be brought up to be delicate like flowers and mild and affectionate educators of children, due attention must be given to making them inflexible defenders of truth. Otherwise, we shall have transformed them into poor, impotent beings for the sake of delicacy and mildness. We must not forget that female lions are still lions. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Our humanity is directly proportional to the purity of our emotions. Although those who are full of bad feelings and whose souls are influenced by egoism look like human beings, whether they really are human is doubtful. Almost everyone can train their bodies, but few people can educate their minds and feelings. The former training produces strong bodies, while the latter produces spiritual people. – M. Fethullah Gulen

The first school for children, whose souls are as bright as mirrors and as quick to record as cameras, are their homes. Their first educators are their mothers. Thus it is fundamental for a nation’s existence and stability that mothers be brought up and educated to be good educators for their children. – M. Fethullah Gulen

Oh, Youth may listen patiently,
While sad Experience tells her tale,
But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,
For ardent Hope will still prevail!
He hears how feeble Pleasure dies,
By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe;
He turns to Hope – and she replies,
Believe it not-it is not so! – Anne Bronte

Youth comes but once in a lifetime. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Youth has everything – everything but experience and tolerance. – Patti Page

Youth has no age. – Pablo Picasso

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. – Franz Kafka

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of an August day. – Donald G. Mitchell

Youth is incredible because you really do feel invincible. – Paul Stanley

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art. – Stanislaw Jerzy

Youth is the ornament of life and one of the universe’s most priceless treasures.

Youth would be too happy, might it add to its own beauty and felicity the wisdom and experience of riper years. Were it possible for it to realize the worth of time, as life’s receding hours reveal it, how rapidly would it press on towards perfection! – Lydia Sigourney

Youth, the crown jewel of life.

Behold yon rough and flinty road
Where youth, now youth no more,
Gropes whining, seeking crumbs of loaves
He cast away of yore. – Emma Ghent Curtis

A happy person doesn’t have to convince other people they are happy. Either you are or you’re not. And if you are, you’re not taking selfies to show people. – Shane Parrish

A person can achieve everything by being simple and humble. – The Vedas

A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living. – Virginia Woolf

A silly society is a youth-obsessed society: To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of grey ‘hairs and no-hairs’ to ‘black hairs’ the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S. – Ilana Mercer

A wealth of experience and wisdom doesn’t have to be a dead giveaway to your increasing years. The spin you put on it is what will keep you young. Don’t let it make you bitter. Learn from it, and let it make you better. – Jayleigh Cape

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

Adolescence is just one big walking pimple. – Carol Burnett

Age considers; youth ventures. – Rabindranath Tagore

Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. – Maria Popova

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else. – Judy Garland

and abandon of youth, and the ripe wisdom of maturity that comes from long experience of pain and pleasure; and over and over a gain she has renewed her childhood and youth and age – Jawaharlal Nehru

As a people, we must be so dumb not to invest in the future of our youth when there’s overwhelming evidence from the past that this is exactly what we should be doing.

As youth and innocence give way to experience, doubt clouds the mind. Those who find renewed purpose in the complexity will thrive instead of falter. – – Jon Skovron

Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman

At some point, you have to break from what your parents expect of you and do what’s right for you. And if you don’t, you haven’t lived your life. – Neil Strauss

Athletics and physical activity are important parts of youth development, in my experience and view. – Chris Gabrieli

Attachment leads to suffering. – Buddha

Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. – Jane Kenyon

Be a student of the world, not a judge. – @dailyzen

Be forgiving with your past self. Be strict with your present self. Be flexible with your future self. – James Clear

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. – Dr. Seuss

Beautiful people are not always good, but good people are always beautiful. – Imam Ali

Before following the crowd, ask yourself if their average result is acceptable to you. – James Pierce

Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn. – Benjamin Franklin

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Chances are you’re starting to give too many fucks about too many unnecessary things. – Mark Manson

Clever plastic surgery can restore an appearance of youth, but nothing changes the expression of age and experience in the eyes. – M.C. Beaton

Competition is fun when you are talented. Competition is dreadful when you are average. – Competition is unnecessary when you are unique. – @orangebook_

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore. – James Baldwin

Consensus does not equal truth. Especially when consensus is socially enforced. – @LifeMathMoney

Daily silence and solitude is what you need to stop caring what they think. – Maxime Lagacé

Dear young people, do not be afraid of making decisive choices in life. Have faith; the Lord will not abandon you! – Pope Francis

Dear youth of the world, never stop believing in yourself, for you have within you the power to achieve unbelievable things.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. – Jim Rohn

Do things for joy or for learning, not for attention. – @dailyzen

Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. – Maria Popova

Don’t hope for a life without problems. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. – Mark Manson

Don’t let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace. – 14th Dalai Lama

Don’t listen to the person who has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions. – Albert Einstein

Don’t take advice from someone who’s never played the part. – Preethi Kasireddy

Don’t trade your authenticity for approval. – Kanye West

Don’t worry about getting perfect, just keep getting better. – Frank E. Peretti

Early on, find things where you have any interest and take on accountability. Don’t worry about short-term compensation. If you dive into the edge of knowledge, which nobody knows how to solve, and solve the hard problems, people will line up behind you. The leverage will come. – Naval Ravikant

Education is the constraining and directing of youth towards that right reason, which the law affirms, and which the experience of the best of our elders has agreed to be truly right. – Plato

Every day, you have the power to choose our better history — by opening your hearts and minds, by speaking up for what you know is right. – Michelle Obama

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone learns by imitation. Don’t be afraid to copy the shit out of your idols when you are just getting started. Over time, you can add your own style and flavor. – Preethi Kasireddy

Everyone should be their own biggest fan. – Kanye West

Everyone you admire was once a beginner. – Jack Butcher

Everything will be ok in the end. If it’s not ok, it’s not the end. – John Lennon

Focus on what brings you energy, not what sucks it away. – @dailyzen

Focus on what matters and let go of what doesn’t. – Unknown

for the days of age are not only much shorter than those in youth, but they rush away from you at a frightening rate. Take a day: a day in youth is an experience, and the last hour is as far away as a child’s Christmas; a day in age is but a dim memory in a week that is already gone. At – Catherine Cookson

Forever that youth who believes in himself.

From the deepest depths of my soul, I believe the youth is our biggest asset for the future.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. – Mark Twain

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. – Mark Twain

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference. – Aristotle

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. – Zora Neale Hurston

Growth starts when you realize no one cares about you and your mistakes. – @orangebook_

Happiness and confidence are the prettiest things you can wear. – Taylor Swift

Haters are people terrified of their own emptiness. Critics are people who want to be those who they criticize. – Paulo Coelho

Have conviction. It makes you irresistible. – Preethi Kasireddy

He is perhaps fifteen – not truly a young man yet, but certainly well on his way – and he walks with the energy and indifference of one who possesses the luxury of youth but not yet the experience to appreciate its value or evanescence. – John Burley

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that 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

Hostel is one phase in a man’s life that teaches him what Indian mothers fail to teach their children despite the use of potential weapons like rolling pin,broom stick, wiper so on and henceforth. Who knows if you are luckier, you might just experience your bachelorhood as a paying guest. – Parul Wadhwa

I am concerned that my children will grow up sheltered from the public. I am concerned that the children get to experience childhood and youth in their time without constant monitoring. It has been very important for both the Crown Prince and myself. – Mette-Marit, Crown Princess Of Norway

I am of the firm belief that empowering our young is one of the surest ways to make this world a better and brighter place.

I am sure my fellow-scientists will agree with me if I say that whatever we were able to achieve in our later years had its origin in the experiences of our youth and in the hopes and wishes which were formed before and during our time as students. – Felix Bloch

I believe anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him. – Eleanor Roosevelt

I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth. – Roman Payne

I dream of the day when the young people of the world become bold enough to tell the old fools of the world who start wars that they are done fighting their stupid wars on their behalf.

I gave my beauty and my youth to men. I am going to give my wisdom and experience to animals – Brigitte Bardot

I just love performing so much, and I threw myself into every musical theater production that was going in my home town and at school. And then, I went to the National Youth Music Theatre, which was really a galvanizing experience for me when I was 1- Gugu Mbatha-Raw

I liked to put young and old in the same room, because they would certainly have different takes on the same problem. – Antonio J. Mendez

I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere. – Carrie Fisher

I still have faith in the youth.

I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience. – Shelley Winters

I’m pleased we are going to be able to offer job opportunities to so many deserving young people. When we provide youth of all abilities and backgrounds with the experience and skills they need to succeed, we build a brighter future for young people and a stronger Ontario economy. – Brad Duguid

If I cannot do great things. I can do small things in a great way. – Martin Luther King Jr

If life were to be a hot cup of tea, youth would be the sugar in it.

If only the older men of this would give the youth of this world a greater voice, what a wonderful place this world would be.

If she were seventeen at the time of her father’s disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience. – Arthur Conan Doyle

If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun. – Alain de Botton

If you are in your twenties and scared of failing, you are failing. No one expects anything from you. Go out there. Explore. Try. Fail. You will be grateful in your thirties. – @orangebook_

If you don’t enjoy the sweet taste of happiness in your youth, I wonder when you are going to taste happiness.

If you want to be average, focus on the performance. If you want to be the best, focus on making practice harder than performance. – Shane Parrish

If you want to find your direction in life, remove your misdirection. – James Pierce

If you’re making mistakes it means you’re out there doing something. – Neil Gaiman

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress. – Barack Obama

Ignore people who don’t respect you. Ignore news that don’t impact you. Ignore food that doesn’t feed you. Ignore all politics. Ignore unnecessary competitions. Ignore emotions that mislead you. Ignore thoughts that won’t help you. – @orangebook_

Ignore those who tell you which way to go without first understanding where you are. – James Pierce

Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. – Mark Manson

In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor’s Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done. – Rashida Jones

In my eyes, one of the most useful things the United Nations ever did with its power is create the International Youth Day (IYD).

In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature. – Bruce Lee

In war, our elders may give the orders…but it is the young who have to fight. – T.H. White

In youth we learn; in age we understand. – Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

India has known the innocence and insouciance of childhood, the passion

It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other. – George MacDonald

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. – E. E. Cummings

It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level. – Philippa Perry

It’s like a rugby team. If you’re picking for the World Cup final, you’re picking experience with youth. Everything is better off having that balance and that mix. I think that, especially, goes for the monarchy as well. – Prince William

It’s about knowing yourself and what you’re good at. Females, males – anyone can be anything they want to be. – Payal Kadakia (ClassPass)

It’s easy to stand in the crowd but it takes courage to stand alone. – Mahatma Gandhi

I’ve found meaning and success by going right when others went left, and down when others went up. – Maxime Lagacé

I’ve found the solution to making this world a better place. Empower the youth.

Jazz celebrates older generations and not just the youth movement. When you ‘sell’ only to people of a certain age, you get cut off from the main body of experience. – Wynton Marsalis

Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest. – Sri Chinmoy

Just be real, that’s all you got to do. – @trey_wing6

Keep true to the dreams of your youth. – Friedrich Schiller

Know yourself. Accept yourself for who you are, right where you are. And then create some boundaries in your routine that aren’t serving you today in order to get closer to the life and work you truly desire. – Mel Robbins

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already. – Marcus Aurelius

Let your youth have free reign. It won’t come again, so be bold, and no repenting. – Nikos Kazantzakis

Life is a balance of holding on and letting go. – Rumi

Life is better when you’re laughing. – Unknown

Look at the world both analytically and differently. Don’t ask yourself what technology is trendy or popular, but rather what has yet to be known or accomplished. – Amber Yang

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. – Stephen Hawking

Mainstream news is mental programming. – Preethi Kasireddy

Many nations of the world spelt their doom by simply ignoring the plights of their young men and women.

Many people undermine success in the long-term by optimizing for status in the short-term. – James Clear

MEANING OF LIFE ENACT,PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TO FACE LIFE EVENTS STORED IN FOR SELF,DO ASSIST OTHERS,RESPECT AND GUARD PARENTS AT OLD AGE AND TAKE THEIR BLESSINGS DAILY FOR FUTURE LIFE GREAT EXPECTATIONS. – Various

Modernity turns everyone into an attention addict; the antidote is solitude, and the withdrawal symptom is loneliness. – Sven Schnieders

More than ever I find myself in the hands of God. This (illness) is what I have wanted all my life from my youth. But now there is a difference; the initiative is entirely with God. It is indeed a profound spiritual experience to know and feel myself so totally in God’s hands. – Pedro Arrupe

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent … I don’t think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience. – Nicholas A. Christakis

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience. – George Bernard Shaw

Not caring about what others think of you is the ultimate form of freedom. No amount of money or status can get you that freedom. It costs $0 and lots of courage. – Preethi Kasireddy

Oh youth, thou art a priceless gift.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. – Herbert Hoover

On this special day, I would like to raise a glass of the finest to the youth of the world. You inspire me remarkably.

One has to choose thrill of learning over earning. knowledge before power, curious experience than money and safe family life. That’s spirit of my favorite youth. – Jay Vasavada

One might trouble one’s dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth. – Kevin Barry

One of the best ways to accurately predict the brightness of a society’s future is by looking at how it currently treats its youth.

One of the worst things we’ve done is discourage the youth from dreaming big dreams and chasing after them.

Our elders are the ones who decide when to go to war. However, they are not the ones who fight and die in these wars. What a sad world the youth live in.

Our societies are so good at teaching us how to generate ambitions. We also need to learn the art of – occasionally – surrendering them. – Alain de Botton

Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can’t ignore them. – Laura Dekker

Paris was incredible. Everything about it for me, from spending hours eating, drinking and talking to walking through the streets … at that time I hadn’t seen that sort of political passion in the youth, and I got to experience that first hand. – Kate Hudson

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who underestimate the power of the youth really don’t know what they are doing.

Pleasure is not happiness. Pleasure is what’s marketed to us. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. – Mark Manson

Promote what you love instead of bashing what you hate. – Ed Latimore

Quit talking and being doing. – Unknown

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less. – Alain de Botton

Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. – Lin Yutang

Real resonates. – Jack Butcher

Some call it growing up. I call it life, and in my experience, it doesn’t necessarily get easier over the years. But the eternal struggle is beautiful, and I’m happy to persevere. – Connor Franta

Spider rubs his eyes in a way that makes it clear that the weight of both life’s experience and the immutability of youth’s colossal dumbassedness is presently crushing his very soul.

Stop f***ing eating sugar. Get some sleep. Move throughout the day. Get some sunlight. Drink some saltwater and hydrate. Take care of your shit. Get the basics down. – Aubrey Marcus

Stop relying on praise from others to feel good about yourself. – Thibaut

that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage. – Kim Stanley Robinson

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old. – Philip Pullman

The beauty of collaboration between older and younger generations is that we combine strength with wisdom—a surefire way to accomplish more for the glory of God. – Brett Harris

The best days of a person’s life are often in their youth.

The bones of the oak tree that had stood by the spring branch during my youth were scattered about the ground, pieces of the skeleton of a majestic life that had passed while I was off growing up and old. – Dan Groat

The challenge of our time is relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible. – Thibaut

The desire to belong often overpowers the desire to improve. – James Clear

The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting. – Walt Disney

The duty of youth is to challenge corruption. – Kurt Cobain

The enemy is a very good teacher. – 14th Dalai Lama

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth. – Diogenes

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt

The future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create. – Barack Obama

The humble are beautiful. Maxime Lagacé

The involvement of the youth in nation building is as important to a nation as the hands are in a game of handball.

The Monster Ball is by nature a protest: A youth church experience to speak out and celebrate against all forms of discrimination + prejudice. – Lady Gaga

The more something scares you, the more you should do it. – Mark Manson

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. – Mark Manson

The older I get, the more I understand that it’s okay to live a life others don’t understand. – Jenna Woginrich

The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do. – Steve Jobs

The only way we can truly change the world is by inspiring and empowering the youth that live in it.

The person seeking to learn wins what the person seeking to impress loses. – Angela Jiang

The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience. – Martin Filler

The principle elements of a puzzle all require the application of energy and persistence, which are the virtues of youth. Mysteries demand experience and insight. – Malcolm Gladwell

The saddest thing I’ve ever seen is old men starting fires and young people burning in them.

The smarter you get, the less you react when it’s not worth it. – @orangebook_

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. – Friedrich Nietzsche

The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring

The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. – Marc Andreessen

The world is in me and you are not even in the world yet. – Warren Eyster

The world is kind to young people who are driven and curious. – David Perell

The youth need to be enabled to become job generators from job seekers. – APJ Abdul Kalam

There is a large gap between being an activist out of the idealism that comes from books, conversations, the fire of youth and being one because you have lived through the depredations that life has thrown at you. – Neel Mukherjee

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist. – Mark Twain

There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. – Maya Angelou

There is so much adventure that only a youth can experience. Youth is not the time to languish in pleasure – youth is the time for exploration and adventure – Jaggi Vasudev

There’s a special place in hell for old men who create wars that claim the lives of young men and women.

There’s no substitute for hard work. – Thomas A. Edison

There’s no two ways about it, any nation that messes with its youth messes with its future.

There’s something inside that’s ready to bloom if you can just care enough, and I know you can. – Maxime Lagacé

Time ripens all things, no man is born wise. – Miguel de Cervantes

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

To be young and to experience the feeling of being alive is a sweet feeling. To feel alive and to have a purpose and a goal to that life is better still. – James Rozoff

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him. – Thomm Quackenbush

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth. – Stanislaw Leszczynski

Turn the pain into power. – Unknown

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

We must tell girls their voices are important. – Malala Yousafzai

We need affordable space travel to inspire our youth, to let them know that they can experience their dreams, can set significant goals and be in a position to lead all of us to future progress in exploration, discovery and fun. Thanks to the X Prize for the inspiration. – Burt Rutan

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable. – Mary Roberts Rinehart

What’s something every teen should know?

Whatever scares or discomforts you is your teacher. – @dailyzen

When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts. – Dalai Lama

When I was younger I used to think that I never wanted to become the guy who didn’t have Saturday night plans and woke up early the next day. Now that I’m older, I’m that guy. And it’s great. – Mark Manson

When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. – Maria Popova

When you are a youth, the possibilities in life are endless.

Wise Young Fool – Sean Beaudoin

You are your own teacher. Investigate yourself to find the truth – inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important. – Ajahn Chah

You become wise when you realize only a handful of things are worth it. – Maxime Lagacé

You can accomplish anything if you can prioritize ruthlessly and control your attention. Both of these have become particularly hard in the present age. As such those who can control these two critical factors will rule the world. – @TheAncientSage

You can do anything you set your mind to. – Eminem

You can’t stop people from saying bad things about you. All you can do is make them liars. – Thomas Sowell

You have nothing to lose in your twenties, except for your self-esteem if you take no risk. – @orangebook_

You have to be authentic, you have to be true, and you have to believe in your heart. – Howard Schultz

You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills. – Jim Rohn

You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person. – Kevin Kelly

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was. – A.S. Byatt

You’ve got to have a young element in a show. Any project needs youth and dynamism as well old codgerdom and experience. – Tim Rice

You,” she said. She grabbed my wrist and pressed two fingers onto me as if taking my pulse and I stopped breathing. “I know you. I remember you from my youth. You contain multitudes. There is a crush of experience coursing by you. And you want to take every experience on the pulse. – Stephanie Danler

Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing. – Aristotle

Young people should be at the forefront of global change and innovation. Empowered, they can be key agents for development and peace. If, however, they are left on society’s margins, all of us will be impoverished. Let us ensure that all young people have every opportunity to participate fully in the lives of their societies. – Kofi Annan

Young people willing to push super hard to make something happen are among the most powerful forces in the world. – Sam Altman

Your actions are a consequence of your thoughts. Your thoughts are a consequence of what you consume. And in the modern age, what you consume is largely a consequence of how you select and refine your social media feed. Choose better inputs. Get better outputs. – James Clear

Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly. – James Fenimore Cooper

Your youth is a great treasure. Enjoy every moment of it while you have it in your possession.

You’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do. – David Foster Wallace

You’re never going to be happy being anyone other than yourself. – Thibaut

Quotes From Wikiquote

• Young men soon give and soon forget affronts;
  Old age is slow in both.
  • Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713), Act II, scene 5

• I pray for no more youth
  perish before its prime;
  That Revenge and iron-heated War
  May fade with all that has gone before
  Into the night of time.
  • Aeschylus, reported in John Lewin, The House of Atreus (1966), p. 110. Adapted from Oresteia; the lines above are from Eumenides (The Furies). Senator Edward Kennedy quoted this passage in testimony before the Commission on Campus Unrest (15 July 1970); Congressional Record, vol. 116, p. 24309

• Youth are diamonds in the sun, diamonds are for ever.
  • Alphaville, Forever Young (1984)

• Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.
  • Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics

• For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
  And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
  Show’d me the high white star of Truth,
  There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
  • Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1855), st. 12

• Young men are fitter to invent, than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business;… Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and that, which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them, like an unruly horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
  • Francis Bacon, “Of Youth and Age”, Essay 42, The Works of Francis Bacon (1844) Vol. 1, p. 48, edited by Basil Montagu (based on the 1625 edition but with modernized spelling)

• Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
  • Simone de Beauvoir, Coming To Age p. 543

• We are beginning to feel at home in our childhood, which the present wants to teach us to forget. … We will steadfastly rely on young people who will find or create the forms for the time between childhood and adulthood. We are sill living in this period without these forms, without mutual support — in short: alone.
  • Walter Benjamin, Letter to Carla Seligson (July 8, 1913, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, p. 40

• Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the “dreams of his youth.” … For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.
  • Walter Benjamin, “Experience” (1913) as translated by L. Spencer and S. Jost, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), pp. 4-5

• YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).

• [sighs] You know the problem with the youth nowadays? They’re YOUNG!
  • Jolee Bindo, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

• They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;
  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
  At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
  We will remember them.
  • Laurence Binyon, For the Fallen (September 1915)

• How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy,—all these moods are equally part of that showery spring-time of life.
  • Randolph Bourne, §I of “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly 100, no. 4 (April 1912), p. 433.

• In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. … 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. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same.  Youth is the drastic antiseptic.  It will not let the elders cry peace, where there is no peace. By its fierce sarcasms it keeps issues alive in the world until they are settled right. It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger.  Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail.
  • Randolph Bourne, §II of “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly 100, no. 4 (April 1912), pp. 437, 438.  Quote republished in Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), pp. 21–22.

• Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future.  And it is this hope which is the lever of progress—one might say, the only lever of progress.
  • Randolph Bourne, §II of “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly 100, no. 4 (April 1912), p. 438.  Quote republished in Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. 22.

• The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit should never be lost.  Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate—a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing.  It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience.  To keep one’s reactions warm and true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation.
  • Randolph Bourne, §III of “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly 100, no. 4 (April 1912), p. 441.  Quote republished in Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1965), p. 22.

• Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
  There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
  But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
  These laid the world away: poured out the red
  Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
  Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
  That men call age, and those who would have been
  Their sons, they gave their immortality.
  • Rupert Brooke, The Dead (1914)

• Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.
  • Edward Bulwer-Lytton, What Will He Do With It? (1858), Book II. Heading of Chapter XV

• We must encourage our youth, listen to them and help them to resolve youth issues. After all, they are our future.
  • Dawn Butler Dawn Butler in Parliament. Hansard. UK Parliament.

• His early dreams of good outstripp’d the truth,
  And troubled manhood follow’d baffled youth.
  • Lord Byron, Lara, Canto 18

• Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
  • Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II (1812), Stanza 23

• Her years
  Were ripe, they might make six-and-twenty springs;
  But there are forms which Time to touch forbears,
  And turns aside his scythe to vulgar things.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto V, Stanza 98

• Sweet scene of my youth!
  Seat of Friendship and Truth,
  Where Love chas’d each fast-fleeting year;
  Loth to leave thee, I mourn’d,
  For a last look I turn’d,
  But thy spire was scarce seen through a Tear.
  • Lord Byron, “The Tear” (1806), Poetical Works, Volume 1

• Prima commendiato proficiscitur a modestia tum pietate in parentes, tum in suos benevolentia.
  • The chief recommendation [in a young man] is modesty, then dutiful conduct toward parents, then affection for kindred.
  • Cicero, De Officiis (44 B.C.), II. 13

• When a man of forty marries a girl of twenty, it isn’t her youth he’s seeking but his own.
  • Lenore Coffee, intertitle from The Dangerous Age (1923); as quoted in Storyline: Recollections of a Hollywood Screenwriter (1973) by Coffee, p. 82; The Women who Write the Movies (1994) by Marsha McCreadie, p. 92; and Women Screenwriters: An International Guide (2015) by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo

• Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.
  • Stephen Colbert Knox College commencement address (3 June 2006)

• I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.
  • Joseph Conrad, Youth, A Narrative (1902)

• Broadly speaking, the governments today are organisations of elderly men who know no other way to work and govern than the ways of their youth, the ways of the past. They have little sense of why their methods no longer work. They know nothing of the new energies and impulses which flood the world today, and are baffled and betrayed by their inability to control events… To a large extent, today, the People’s Voice is the voice of the young. Governments, and the media under their control, largely ignore or vilify the voices and aspirations of the young; yet it is the young who have the answers, who understand that humanity is One, who call for fairness, for justice and sharing, and an end to war. The voice of such young people can never be silenced, and will not for long be ignored. The Voice of the People, young and old, will drown the whimpers of the men of money and lead humanity to the New Dawn. So will it be.
  • Benjamin Creme, Youth at the Helm, Share International Magazine, (April 2012)

• We must be very careful when we give advice to younger people: sometimes they follow it!
  • Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer, 1972 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 15 (10), (October 1972): pp. 859–866

• Young people have taken part in remarkable political mobilisation in the last year. They have participated in global climate change strikes and demonstrations and protests against ruling elites, corruption and inequality in countries such as Algeria, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq and Libya. However, my research shows that they can be excluded from decision-making and peacebuilding processes. In particular, young people frequently think that their messages are devalued or ignored. Young people are often perceived as vulnerable and in need of protection. Yet they can be simultaneously viewed as dangerous, violent and uncontrollable. These views have long dominated attitudes towards youth. Moreover, popular beliefs about young people’s lack of experience and political apathy has meant that many people are ignorant about their contribution to political debate. This has also led to a failure by political leaders to acknowledge young people’s potential to bring about political change.
  • Cihan Dizdaroğlu, Young people are campaigning for political change worldwide – but their voices are too often ignored (April 1, 2020), The Conversation

• Although countries are hesitant to include youth in politics, young people find alternative ways to cope with marginalisation and amplify their voices. This is apparent in the youth-led protests around the world. Young people are demanding to be leaders today, rather wait their turn in an elusive future.
  • Cihan Dizdaroğlu, Young people are campaigning for political change worldwide – but their voices are too often ignored (April 1, 2020), The Conversation

• Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 90

• Whoso neglects learning in his youth,
  Loses the past and is dead for the future.
  • Euripides, Phrixus

• The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.
  • Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975)

• Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein.
  • Youth is intoxication without wine.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Diwan – Saki Nameh: Book of the Cupbearer, 1819-1827

• Even if the world progresses generally, youth will always begin at the beginning, and the epochs of the world’s cultivation will be repeated in the individual.
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as reported by Johann Peter Eckermann in Conversations with Goethe

• As I traveled, talking about these issues, I met so many young people who had lost hope. Some were depressed; some were apathetic; some were angry and violent. And when I talked to them, they all more or less felt this way because we had compromised their future and the world of tomorrow was not going to sustain their great-grandchildren.
  • Jane Goodall “Then & Now: Jane Goodall”

• It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.
  • Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 14

• Younger people actually understand how it works. They don’t just take what they are fed according to their preferences; they go look at other things.
  • Bill Kristol, as quoted in “Bill Kristol: ‘I’ve Always Been More Anti-Baby Boomer and More Pro-Millennial'” (30 October 2018), by Renee Brown-Cheng, Bold
• Youth around the globe saw the world being squeezed by two equal and unsavory forces. American youth had learned that it was important to stand up to both the communists and the anticommunists. The Port Huron Statement recognized that communism should be opposed: “The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total repression of organized opposition, as well as a vision of the future in the name of which much human life had been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized.” But according to the Port Huron Statement, anticommunist forces in America were more harmful than helpful. The statement cautions that “an unreasoning anti-Communism has become a major social problem.” This first started to be expressed in the 1950s with the film characters portrayed by James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley, and the beat generation writings of Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But the feeling grew in the 1960s. The young invested hope in John Kennedy, largely because he too was relatively young—the second youngest president in history replacing Eisenhower, who at the time was the oldest. The inauguration of Kennedy in 1961 was the largest change of age ever at the White House, with almost thirty years’ difference between the exiting and entering presidents. But even under Kennedy, young Americans experienced the Cuban missile crisis as a terrifying experience and one that taught that people in power play with human life even if they are young and have a good sense of humor. Most of the people who arrived at college campuses in the mid-1960s had a deep resentment and distrust of any kind of authority. People in positions of authority anywhere on the political spectrum were not to be trusted. That is why there were no absolute leaders. The moment a Savio or Hayden declared himself leader, he would have lost all credibility.
  • Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (2004), p. 101, ISBN 0-345-45581-9

• A young ticket should never be envied, they queue for the bus the same as us.
  • Michael Lieber The War Hero (Novel) – Chapter Three – p100 – Mrs. Betridge

• The course of life is like the child’s game – “here we go round by the rule of contrary” — and youth, above all others, is the season of united opposites, with all its freshness and buoyancy. At no period of our existence is depression of the spirit more common or more painful. As we advance in life our duties become defined ; we act more from necessity and less from impulse ; custom takes the place of energy, and feelings, no longer powerfully excited, are proportionably quiet in re-action. But youth, balancing itself upon hope, is for ever in extremes; its expectations are continually aroused only to be baffled ; and disappointment, like a summer shower, is violent in proportion to its brevity.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality (1831), Vol I, Chapter 1

• Hard are life’s early steps; and but that youth is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, men would behold its threshold, and despair.
  • Letitia Elizabeth Landon Ethel Churchill (or The Two Brides) (1837) Vol. I, page 79

• Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion (1839), Book II, Chapter X

• It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)

• It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due.
  • W. Somerset Maugham, Collected short stories 1, “The voice of the turtle”, p. 250

• For the more paart, youthe is rebel,
  Un-to reson & hatith her doctryne.
  • As for the moré part Youth is rebél
    Unto Reasón, and hateth her doctrine.
  • Thomas Occleve, from Frederick Furnivall and Israel Gollancz’s three-volume edition of Hoccleve’s Works (Early English Text Society, 1892-1925), Line 65, vol. 1, p. 27; modern spelling from Henry Morley (ed.) Shorter English Poems (London: Cassell, 1883), p. 58

• Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
  • Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living, (19 April 1940)

• We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow;
  Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), Part II, line 238

• “Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [… He] has too many dogmas to […] easily […] believe in a new truth […]; too many sympathies and antipathies […] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; […] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion […].”
  • Bolesław Prus, “Oda do młodości” [Ode to Youth] (1905)

• Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young… and I seem to have forgotten lately.
  • J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix (Dumbledore)

• Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
  • J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Dumbledore)

• My salad days;
  When I was green in judgment.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act I, scene 5, line 73

• The spirit of a youth
  That means to be of note, begins betimes.
  • William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1600s), Act IV, scene 4, line 26

• The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
  If she unmask her beauty to the moon;
  Virtue itself ‘scapes not calumnious strokes.
  The canker galls the infants of the spring,
  Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
  And in the morn and liquid dew of youth,
  Contagious blastments are most imminent.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act I, scene 3, line 36. “Infants of the spring” found also in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I, scene 1, line 100

• For youth no less becomes
  The light and careless livery that it wears,
  Than settled age his sables, and his weeds
  Importing health and graveness.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act IV, scene 7, line 79

• Is in the very May-morn of his youth,
  Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry V (c. 1599), Act I, scene 2, line 120

• He that is more than a youth, is not for me, and he that is less than man, I am not for him.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (1598-99), Act II, scene 1, line 40

• Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
  • George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists”, appendix 2 to Man and Superman, in his Selected Plays with Prefaces (1948), vol. 3, p. 742

• O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood.
  • John Lancaster Spalding, Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), pp. 58-59

• At first it had been youth’s ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry.
  • Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (1930)

• Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010) Chance, Success, Happiness, and Stoicism, p. 24.

• 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, British author. From his autobiography, The Way to Minak (1968), Ch XV, p. 157

• What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
  Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy’s?
  • Alfred Tennyson, Locksley Hall (1835, published 1842), Stanza 70

• Newborn lifeforms – babies, puppies, kittens, lambs, and so on… are fragile, delicate, not yet firmly established in materiality. An innocence, a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans.
  • Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)

• ‘There was a time,’ Nikolai Artemyevitch resumed, ‘when daughters did not allow themselves to look down on their parents—when the parental authority forced the disobedient to tremble. That time has passed, unhappily: so at least many persons imagine; but let me tell you, there are still laws which do not permit—do not permit—in fact there are still laws. I beg you to mark that: there are still laws——’
  • Ivan Turgenev, On the Eve (1860), Chapter 30, translated by Constance Garnett

• Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust.Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life.

  You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

  In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!

  • Samuel Ullman, “Youth”; reported in Jane Manner, The Silver Treasury, Prose and Verse for Every Mood (1934), p. 323–24.
  • The version quoted above is longer and also has minor variations in wording and punctuation from that in a privately printed edition of Ullman’s poems, From the Summit of Years, Four Score (n.d). The oft-quoted “you are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt”, etc., is missing in From the Summit of Years… fourth paragraph: “Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young”. General Douglas MacArthur quoted the entire poem without attribution on his seventy-fifth birthday, in a speech to the Los Angeles County Council, American Legion, Los Angeles, California (January 26, 1955), in Representative Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1964), p. 85, Senate Doc. 88–95. MacArthur had this framed over his desk when visited in Manila by war correspondent Colonel Frederick Palmer, according to an article in This Week Magazine condensed in the December 1945 issue of The Reader’s Digest, p. 1, which said, “The General has had it in sight ever since it was given to him some years ago … it is based on a poem written by the late Samuel Ullman of Birmingham, Ala”. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn’s seventy-eighth birthday fell upon the opening day of the second session of the 86th Congress. “During the January 6 [1960] ceremonies someone remembered what General Douglas MacArthur had said on his own seventy-fifth birthday and thought it applied quite well to Rayburn”. C. Dwight Dorough, Mr. Sam (1962), chapter 22, p. 546. There followed an excerpt of this poem, but it is not to be found in the Congressional Record account of the day, so perhaps the remembrance was an informal one.

• If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulses of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavor is to subdue our children’s spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life.
  • Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims, E. Lee, trans. (1903), pp. 185-186

• Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
  Prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus
  Et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.
  • 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 (29 BC), III, 66 (trans. John Dryden).
    • Cf. J. B. Rose’s translation:
      Ah, how fleetly speeds the little span
      Of lusty youth allowed to mortal man!
      Diseases grow, age comes, and joys decay,
      Till death demands his miserable prey.

• In several educational institutions during the last few years manifestation of student activity in riots has been exciting the country. To the conservative mind, these riots bode no good. As a matter of fact student riots of one sort or another, protests against the order that is, kicks against college and university management indicate a healthy growth and a normal functioning of the academic mind.Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on. But the old orders should not be moved easily—certainly not at the mere whim or behest of youth. There must be clash and if youth hasn’t enough force or fervor to produce the clash the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay. If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.
  • William Allen White, “Student Riots”, editorial, The Emporia (Kansas) Gazette (April 8, 1932); reported in Forty Years on Main Street, compiled by Russell H. Fitzgibbon (1937), p. 331

• Adolescents are simply those people who haven’t as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. … Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life.
  • Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Short Sun, Volume 2: In Green’s Jungles (2000), Ch. 23

• Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor;
  Part with it as with money, sparing; pay
  No moment but in purchase of its worth,
  And what it’s worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 47

Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 921-24.

• Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
  It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
  More grateful than this marble sleep;
  It hears a voice within it tell:
  Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well.
  ‘Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
  But ’tis not what our youth desires.
  • Matthew Arnold, Youth and Calm, line 19

• Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business.
  • Francis Bacon, Of Youth and Age

• I was between
  A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy,
  A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.
  • R. H. Barham, Aunt Fanny

• Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.
  • Isaac Barrow, Duty of Thanksgiving, Works, Volume I, p. 66

• Our youth we can have but to-day;
  We may always find time to grow old.
  • Bishop Berkeley, Can Love be Controlled by Advice?

• Young fellows will be young fellows.
  • Isaac Bickerstaf, Love in a Village, Act II, scene 2

• And both were young, and one was beautiful.
  • Lord Byron, The Dream, Stanza 2

• Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
  • Thomas Carlyle, Essays, Schiller

• As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.
  • Cicero, Cato; or, An Essay on Old Age

• Teneris, heu, lubrica moribus ætas!
  • Alas! the slippery nature of tender youth.
  • Claudianus, De Raptu Proserpinæ, III. 227

• Life went a-Maying
  With Nature, Hope, and Poesy;
  * When I was young!
  When I was young?—Ah, woful when!
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Youth and Age

• A young Apollo, golden haired,
  Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
  Magnificently unprepared
  For the long littleness of life.
  • Mrs. Cornford, On Rupert Brooke (1915)

• Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise,
  We love the play-place of our early days;
  The scene is touching, and the heart is stone,
  That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.
  • William Cowper, Tirocinium, line 296

• Youth, what man’s age is like to be, doth show;
  We may our ends by our beginnings know.
  • Sir John Denham, Of Prudence, line 225

• Youth should watch joys and shoot them as they fly.
  • John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, Act III, scene 1

• Olympian bards who sung
  Divine ideas below,
  Which always find us young,
  And always keep us so.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, The Poet. Introduction

• Angelicus juvenis senibus satanizat in annis.
  • An angelic boyhood becomes a Satanic old age.
  • Erasmus, Fam. Coll.; quoted as a proverb invented by Satan

• Si jeunesse savoit, si vieillesse pouvoit.
  • Henri Étienne, Les Premices. “Si jeune savoit, et vieux pouvoit, / Jamais disette n’y auroit. If youth but knew, and age were able, / Then poverty would be a fable.” Proverb of the Twelfth Century

• Youth holds no society with grief.
  • Euripides, line 73

• O happy unown’d youths! your limbs can bear
  The scorching dog-star and the winter’s air,
  While the rich infant, nurs’d with care and pain,
  Thirsts with each heat and coughs with every rain!
  • John Gay, Trivia, Book II, line 145

• Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows,
  While proudly rising o’er the azure realm
  In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
  Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm.
  • Thomas Gray, Bard, Part II, Stanza 2

• The insect-youth are on the wing,
  Eager to taste the honied spring,
  And float amid the liquid noon!
  • Thomas Gray, Ode on the Spring, Stanza 3, line 5

• Over the trackless past, somewhere,
  Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
  Only regained by faith and prayer,
  Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
  Each lost day has its patron saint!
  • Bret Harte, Lost Galleon, last stanza

• There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
  • William Hazlitt, Table Talk, The Feeling of Immortality in Youth

• Ah, youth! forever dear, forever kind.
  • Homer, The Iliad, Book XIX, line 303. Pope’s translation

• Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes! they turn,
  Like marigolds, toward the sunny side.
  • Jean Ingelow, The Four Bridges, Stanza 56

• All the world’s a mass of folly,
  Youth is gay, age melancholy:
  Youth is spending, age is thrifty,
  Mad at twenty, cold at fifty;
  Man is nought but folly’s slave,
  From the cradle to the grave.
  • William Henry Ireland, Modern Ship of Fools (Of the Folly of all the World)

• Towering in confidence of twenty-one.
  • Samuel Johnson, letter to Bennet Langton. Jan., 1758

• When all the world is young, lad,
  And all the trees are green;
  And every goose a swan, lad,
  And every lass a queen;
  Then hey, for boot and horse, lad,
  And round the world away;
  Young blood must have its course, lad,
  And every dog his day.
  • Charles Kingsley, Water Babies

• Our youth began with tears and sighs,
  With seeking what we could not find;
  We sought and knew not what we sought;
  We marvel, now we look behind:
  Life’s more amusing than we thought.
  • Andrew Lang, Ballade of Middle Age

• Flos juvenum (Flos juventutis).
  • The flower of the young men (the flower of youth).
  • Livy, VIII. 8; XXXVII. 12

• Standing with reluctant feet,
  Where the brook and river meet,
  Womanhood and childhood fleet!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Maidenhood

• How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams
  With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
  Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
  Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus, line 66

• In its sublime audacity of faith,
  “Be thou removed!” it to the mountain saith,
  And with ambitious feet, secure and proud,
  Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus

• Youth, that pursuest with such eager pace
  Thy even way,
  Thou pantest on to win a mournful race:
  Then stay! oh, stay!
  Pause and luxuriate in thy sunny plain;
  Loiter,—enjoy:
  Once past, Thou never wilt come back again,
  A second Boy.
  • Richard Monckton Milnes, Carpe Diem

• ‘Tis now the summer of your youth: time has not cropped the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.
  • Edward Moore, The Gamester, Act III, scene 4

• The smiles, the tears
  Of boyhood’s years,
  The words of love then spoken.
  • Thomas Moore, Oft in the Stilly Night

• Dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer.
  • How different from the present man was the youth of earlier days!
  • Ovid, Heroides, IX. 24

• The atrocious crime of being a young man.
  • William Pitt to Walpole. Boswell’s Life of Johnson (6 March 1741)

• When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one.
  • Alexander Pope, Epistle I, Book I, line 38

• De jeune hermite, vieil diable.
  • Of a young hermit, an old devil.
  • François Rabelais, Pantagruel. Quoted, as a “proverbe authentique”

• Crabbed age and youth cannot live together;
  Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
  Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
  Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.
  Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short;
  Youth is nimble, age is lame;
  Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;
  Youth is wild, and age is tame.
  Age, I do abhor thee; youth I do adore thee.
  • The Passionate Pilgrim (attributed to William Shakespeare), Stanza 12

• Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
  Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
  So thou through windows of thine age shall see,
  Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
  • William Shakespeare, Sonnet III

• Hail, blooming Youth!
  May all your virtues with your years improve,
  Till in consummate worth you shine the pride
  Of these our days, and succeeding times
  A bright example.
  • William Somervile, The Chase (1735), Book III, line 389

• Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age

• For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age

• Youth is wholly experimental.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, To a Young Gentleman

• Youth should be a savings-bank.
  • Sophie Swetchine

• What unjust judges fathers are, when in regard to us they hold
  That even in our boyish days we ought in conduct to be old,
  Nor taste at all the very things that youth and only youth requires;
  They rule us by their present wants not by their past long-lost desires.
  • Terence, The Self-Tormentor, Act I, scene 3. F. W. Ricord’s translation

• The next, keep under Sir Hobbard de Hoy:
  The next, a man, no longer a boy.
  • Thomas Tusser, Hundred Points of Husbandry

• Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
  But to be young was very Heaven!
  • William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XI

• A youth to whom was given
  So much of earth, so much of heaven.
  • William Wordsworth, Ruth

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

• The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, p. 623

• Use thy youth so that thou mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof. Use it as the spring-time which soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all provisions for a long and happy life.
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, p. 623

• Every stage of life has its own set of manners, that is suited to it, and best becomes it. Each is beautiful in its season; and you might as well quarrel with the child’s rattle, and advance him directly to the boy’s top and span-farthing, as expect from diffident youth the manly confidence of riper age.
  • Bishop Hurd, p. 624

• A youth thoughtless! when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! when all the happiness of his home forever depends on the chances or the passions of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when his every act is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than now — though indeed there is only one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless — his death-bed. No thinking should be ever left to be done there.
  • John Ruskin, p. 624

• Oh thou corrupter of youth! I would not take thy death, for all the pleasures of thy guilty life, a thousand fold. Thou shalt draw near to the shadow of death. To the Christian these shades are the golden haze which heaven’s light makes, when it meets the earth and mingles with its shadows. But to thee, these shall be shadows full of phantom-shapes. Images of terror in the Future shall dimly rise and beckon: — the ghastly deeds of the Past shall stretch out their skinny hands to push thee forward! Thou shalt not die unattended! Despair shall mock thee. Agony shall tender to thy parched lips her fiery cup. Remorse shall feel for thy heart and rend it open. Good men shall breathe freer at thy death, and utter thanksgiving when thou art gone.
  • Henry Ward Beecher, p. 624

• When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
  • George MacDonald, p. 624

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

• I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
  • Sir James M. Barrie, Peter Pan, act V, scene i, p. 143 (1928). Peter Pan is speaking

• Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.
  • Attributed to Edmund Burke.—John P. Bradley, Leo F. Daniels, and Thomas C. Jones, The International Encyclopedia of Quotations, p. 791 (1978). Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989)

• The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch”.
  • Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield, letter to Philip Stanhope, his natural son, November 24, 1747.—The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, vol. 3, p. 1057 (1932). The second part of the sentence quotes the Bible, Matthew 15:14. In a later letter to his son, January 15, 1753, Lord Chesterfield remarked that “Young men are as apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are to think themselves sober enough”.—Letters, vol. 5, p. 1994–95

• Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years! Don’t be content with things as they are…. Don’t take No for an answer. Never submit to failure. Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance. You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.
  • Winston Churchill, A Roving Commission, chapter 4, p. 60 (1930)

• We have all seen with a sense of nausea the abject, squalid, shameless avowal made in the Oxford Union. We are told that we ought not to treat it seriously. The Times talked of “the children’s hour”. I disagree. It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of Germany, Italy, and France when they read the message sent out by Oxford University in the name of Young England.
  Let them be assured that it is not the last word. But before they blame, as blame they should, these callow ill-tutored youths, they must be sure that they have not been set a bad example by people much older and much higher up.
  • Winston Churchill, extract of address, Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union meeting, London, February 17, 1933.—Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James, vol. 5, p. 5220 (1974). On February 9, undergraduates at the Oxford Union had approved the resolution, “That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight for King and Country” by a vote of 275 to 153. The editorial in The Times (London) appeared February 13, p. 13. See Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5, p. 456 (1976) for a slightly varied version of Churchill’s speech.

• That we may live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy and a privileged and prosperous People, is my Prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion. We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.
  • Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, final sentence, p. 497 (1980). First published 1845

• Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., associate justice, supreme court of Massachusetts, address before John Sedgwick Post No. 4, Grand Army of the Republic, Keene, New Hampshire, May 30, 1884.—Speeches of Oliver Wendell Holmes, p. 11 (1934)

• Thou know’st the o’er-eager vehemence of youth,
  How quick in temper, and in judgement weak.
  • Homer, The Iliad, book 23, lines 677–78, trans. Edward, Earl of Derby, ed. 5, vol. 2, p. 372–73 (1865). The many translations of these lines of Homer’s vary: The Iliad of Homer, trans. into blank verse by William Cullen Bryant, vol. 4, p. 139 (1905),
    “Thou dost know
    The faults to which the young are ever prone;
    The will is quick to act, the judgment weak”;
    Robert Graves, The Anger of Achilles, p. 364 (1959), “It is easy for a youngster to go wrong from hastiness and lack of thought”; and Robert Fitzgerald, p. 553, lines 588–89 (1974), “You know a young man may go out of bounds: / his wits are nimble, but his judgment slight”.

• Into my heart an air that kills
  From yon far country blows:
  What are those blue remembered hills,
  What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain,
  The happy highways where I went
  And cannot come again.
  • A. E. Housman, “Into my heart an air that kills”, A Shropshire Lad, verse 40, p. 72 (1932)

• It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.
  • Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 121, May 14, 1751.—The Rambler; A Periodical Paper, Published 1750, 1751, 1752, p. 210 (1825)

• Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement of danger. It 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 love of ease.
  • Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation”, address delivered at the University of Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966.—Congressional Record, June 6, 1966, vol. 112, p. 12430. Kennedy was quoting Samuel Ullman’s description of youth; see No. 2099

• Nothing matters more to the future of this Nation than insuring that our young men and women learn to believe in themselves and believe in their dreams, and that they develop this capacity—that you develop this capacity, so that you keep it all of your lives…. I believe one of America’s most priceless assets is the idealism which motivates the young people of America. My generation has invested all that it has, not only its love but its hope and faith, in yours.
  • Richard Nixon, remarks at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, January 14, 1971. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1971, p. 31, 33

• Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
  • Attributed to George Bernard Shaw.—Franklin P. Adams, FPA Book of Quotations, p. 883 (1952). Archibald Henderson, in his third biography of Shaw, George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century, chapter 62, p. 845 (1956), included this statement (using “sin” instead of “crime”) in a section of anecdotes. He had not included this in earlier biographies of 1911 and 1932. The anecdote apparently was first told in the 1930s, since it is one which appears in Lewis and Faye Copeland, 10,000 Jokes, Toasts, & Stories, p. 555 (1939, 1940). It was also used in Reader’s Digest, April 1940, p. 84. Sometimes heard “…waste it on the young”. Dr. Stanley Weintraub, author and editor of books on Shaw, believes this is incorrectly attributed to Shaw and that it actually belongs to Oscar Wilde, since Shaw often took quotations from Wilde and inverted them for his own use.

• The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
  • Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, speech to the Inter-Church Conference on Federation, New York City, November 19, 1905, as reported by The New York Times next day.—The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, vol. 16, p. 228

Misattributed

• The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. — misattributed to Socrates
  • a paraphrase of a quote from Aristophanes’ Clouds, (see w:The Clouds,) a comedic play known for its caricature of Socrates.
• I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint. — misattributed to Hesiod (See Hesiod#Misattributed)
• We live in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They frequently inhabit taverns and have no self control.
  • (mis-)attributed to an inscription in an Ancient Egyptian tomb in Buckminster Fuller’s I Seem To Be a Verb.

See also

• Responsibilities Of The Children To Their Parent
• Youth rights
• The Spirit Of Youth