Youth Quotes

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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.

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!'.

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasure, age is full of care

William Shakespeare

The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think with you, that nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are in my opinion, the strength of the state; more so than riches or arms.

Benjamin Franklin

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous.

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

G. K. Chesterton

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Let no one think that he can conquer the first impressions of his youth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Forgetful youth! but know, the Power above With ease can save each object of his love; Wide as his will extends his boundless grace.

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

G. K. Chesterton

If the world does improve on the whole, yet youth must always begin anew, and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Towards the ferry and the shore
The multitudinous phantoms pour;
Matrons, and men, and heroes dead,
And boys and maidens, yet unwed,
And youths who funeral fires have fed
Before their parents' eye.

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we havehad our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude.

Benjamin Franklin

Youths of the Pellaians and of the Macedonians and of the Hellenic Amphictiony and of the Lakedaimonians and of the Corinthians… and of all the Hellenic peoples, join your fellow-soldiers and entrust yourselves to me, so that we can move against the barbarians and liberate ourselves from the Persian bondage, for as Greeks we should not be slaves to barbarians.

Alexander the Great

Dear youths, I warn you cherish peace divine,
And in your hearts lay deep these words of mine.

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

American youths are pale and precocious, or sallow and supercilious, but American girls are pretty and charming — little oases of pretty unreasonableness in a vast desert of practical common-sense.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent—sweet, not lasting; The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.

William Shakespeare

Let him who loves, where love success may find,
Spread all his sails before the prosperous wind;
But let poor youths who female scorn endure,
And hopeless burn, repair to me for cure.