Youth Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

William Shakespeare

Søren Kierkegaard

J. K. Rowling

Franz Kafka

Jean Cocteau

Natalie Clifford Barney

William Banting

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.

William Shakespeare

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.

Søren Kierkegaard

My youth is escaping without giving me anything it owes me.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

V. S. Pritchett

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

Robert Browning

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Rock and rollers can get you the youth buzz, and younger people are fanatical readers.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom: youth is the season of credulity.

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham

While I am certainly not asking you to close your eyes to the experiences of earlier generations, I want to advise you not to conform too soon and to resist the pressure of practical necessity. Free imagination is the inestimable prerogative of youth and it must be cherished and guarded as a treasure.

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

Brigitte Bardot

Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue!
Who would not be that youth? What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country!

Oh, high is the price of parenthood,
And daughters may cost you double.
You dare not forget, as you thought you could,
That youth is a plague and a trouble.

Phyllis McGinley

I was to find my cause, to hate war with a deadly loathing, to feel a murderous instinct to kill those men who, having lived their youth, would send into war other youth, not lived, unfulfilled, to fight and die for them; to hate the pride and cowardice of these old men, making their wars that boys must die.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Youth will be served, every dog has his day, and mine has been a fine one.

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

To many a man, and sometimes to a youth, there comes the opportunity to choose between honorable competence and tainted wealth. The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable, holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success.

Orison Swett Marden

Childhood does sometimes pay a second visit to man—youth never.

Anna Brownell Jameson