Youth Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

There is a fallacy that the powerful emotion of youth mellows with time. Not true. One learns to control and suppress it. But it doesn't lessen. It simply hides and concentrates itself in more discreet places. When one accidentally stumbles into one of these abysses, the pain is spectacular.

Why make excuses close to the truth, especially when now I am presuming to try to grasp in my old age what I did not gain in my youth because my sins prevented me from making what I had read my own? But who will believe me, even though I should say it again? A young man, almost a beardless boy, I was taken captive before I knew what I should desire and what I should shun.

In my capacity as a leader of the popular and youth revolution in Yemen, I reaffirm our adherence to the peaceful nature of our struggle until the end. At the same time, I ardently call upon the free people of the world to examine what is happening in my country and Syria especially, and to honour their responsibilities to confront rulers who do not hesitate to carry out the most heinous crimes against people who have the temerity to demand their natural rights to freedom and dignity.

Tawakkol Karman

For a long time he stood at the window looking at the shining rails. They had always fascinated him. Squinting a little he saw them stretch away to infinity, carrying him off to his rediscovered youth.

The busy chatter of the heat
Shrilled like a parakeet;
And shuddering at the noonday light
The dust lay dead and white As powder on a mummy's face,
Or fawned with simian grace
Round booths with many a hard bright toy
And wooden brittle joy: The cap and bells of Time the Clown
That, jangling, whistled down
Young cherubs hidden in the guise
Of every bird that flies; And star-bright masks for youth to wear,
Lest any dream that fare
— Bright pilgrim — past our ken, should see
Hints of Reality.

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment.

The priest who has lost the resilience of youth cannot be helped; his polymorphously playful and imaginative energies have been emasculated by a long conditioning to the ways of the old order; he would be liberated into a sea of undifferentiated boredom and anxiety. Only the man whose desires and passions are intact has a future.

You, that have toiled during youth, to set your son upon higher ground, and to enable him to begin where you left off, do not expect that son to be what you were - diligent, modest, active, simple in his tastes, fertile in resources.... Poverty educated you; wealth will educate him. You cannot suppose the result will be the same.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

The primary evidence that our present situation is unique, without any parallel in the past, is that the generation gap is world-wide. The particular events taking place in any country — China, England, Pakistan, Japan, the United States, New Guinea, or elsewhere — are not enough to explain the unrest that is stirring modern youth everywhere.

They sell us the president the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us everything from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars

For Polletti, experience had brought only the bitter residue of pleasure which is the true essence of disenchantment. Certain delights which in his youth had seemed unique and unobtainable had turned out, upon acquisition, to be infinitely and drearily repeatable.

Robert Sheckley

No, it is not you I love so ardently,
The glitter of your beauty is not for me:
I love in you my past suffering
And my perished youth.

Mikhail Lermontov

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Arus saw a tall powerfully built youth, naked but for a loin-cloth, and sandals strapped high about his ankles. His skin was burned brown as by the suns of the wastelands and Arus glanced nervously at his broad shoulders, massive chest and heavy arms, A single look at the moody, broad-browed features told the watchman the man was no Nemedian. From under a mop of unruly black hair smoldered a pair of dangerous blue eyes. A long sword hung in a leather scabbard at his girdle.

Robert E. Howard

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of whom was past sixty.

John Kendrick Bangs

Education must be increasingly concerned about the fullest development of all children and youth, and it will be the responsibility of the schools to seek learning conditions which will enable each individual to reach the highest level of learning possible.

I compare that old relic with myself... ruins and dilapidation. What a difference between then and now. Then, youth, strength and riches; now age, weakness and poverty.

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo

Youth, in most ways, is a grossly overadvertised commodity. It is supposed to be the best part of life; but actually it is a jungle and a swamp and a desert. Everything is too terribly important to be borne; that is why we have to appear irresponsible and downright silly. We just couldn't bear caring so much about everything, if we didn't.

Margaret Lee Runbeck

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. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

Robert Louis Stevenson

Some men are born old, and some never seem so. If we keep well and cheerful we are always young, and at last die in youth, even when years would count us old.

Youth endures all things, kings and poetry and love. Everything but time.

His agony was horrible, death in one of its most appealing forms, that I once again witnessed at a very close range. If you add to these almost physical emotions my old bond of friendship with Edouard, a entire past of youth and work suddenly ending, you will know that I am devastated.

After the initial critical learning period of youth is over, the areas of the brain that need to be 'turned on' to allow enhanced, long lasting learning can only be activated when something important, surprising, or novel occurs, or if we make the effort to pay close attention.

Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind

François de La Rochefoucauld

Youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favored one, but in practice…more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

Samuel Butler (novelist)