Youth Quotes

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Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.

In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Like all very handsome men who die tragically, he left not so much a character behind him as a legend. Youth and death shed a halo through which it is difficult to see a real face.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

Henry David Thoreau

There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born,
Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn;
And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.

Rudyard Kipling

In the youth of a state arms do flourish; in the middle age of a state, learning; and then both of them together for a time; in the declining age of a state, mechanical arts and merchandise.

In one's youth every person and every event appear to be unique. With age one becomes much more aware that similar events recur. Later on, one is less often delighted or surprised, but also less disappointed than in earlier years.

Albert Einstein

You see, in this country are a number of youths who do not like to work, and the college is an excellent place for them.

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear.

Arthur Schopenhauer

The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy. The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have spared the feelings of him the bearer.

Charles Dickens

On the whole, one would say that their strength is in their infantry, which fights along with the cavalry; admirably adapted to the action of the latter is the swiftness of certain foot soldiers, who are picked from the entire youth of their country, and stationed in front of the line.

Methinks you are my glass, and not my brother: I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

William Shakespeare

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.

Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

William Shakespeare

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.

In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age—each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.

Should I live for centuries, the sweet period of my youth would not be reborn, nor effaced from my memory.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth.

William Shakespeare

But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.

Leonardo da Vinci

At Achilles' tomb:

O fortunate youth, to have found Homer as the herald of your glory!

Alexander the Great

Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.