Youth Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Oh roses for the flush of youth,
And laurel for the perfect prime;
But pluck an ivy branch for me
Grown old before my time.

Christina Rossetti

The children are designated as Air Force aides of the Hitler youth and wear military uniforms and become used to handling the anti-aircraft artillery flak guns. 15 and 16 year old children as warriors! If the war still continues to last for a long time, perhaps the babies will be also employed. Total war!!

Friedrich Kellner

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.

W. Somerset Maugham

I was amazed by the fact that I was not the only writer living, not the only young man "with a locomotive in his chest, and that's a fact," not the only youth with a million hungers and not one of them appeasable, not the only one who is lonely among multitudes, and does not know why.

I always dreamed in my youth of a great, consuming love. I was often disappointed and returned each time to my music for consolation. It never failed me.

And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.

I never thought before my death to see
Youth's vision thus made perfect.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth,
All death will he annul, all tears assuage? —
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, age?

I hold in my heart that rebellious spirit of youth that demands change.

Dennis Kucinich

I spent most of my youth hauling sides of beef and pork to my father's shop. Carrying you is far more enjoyable." "How sweet," Annabelle mumbled sickly, her eyes closed. "Every woman dreams of being told that she's preferable to a dead cow.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

Baldur von Schirach

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

It is autumn; not without But within me is the cold. Youth and spring are all about; It is I that have grown old.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

For the complete life, the perfect pattern includes old age as well as youth and maturity.

W. Somerset Maugham

The past and present
Are as one –
Accordant and discordant
Youth and age
And death and birth –
For out of one came all
From all comes one.

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

All the constructions of this first phase of the youth of the group bear witness to its constant characteristics. The epic imagination is a proof of its esemplastic power. Everything is formal, inventive and arithmetical, therefore rhythmic.

While this day was legally established many years ago as an occasion to be devoted to the memory of our country's dead, it can not but each year refresh the sentiment of respect and honor in which our country holds their living comrades. Of those great armies that maintained the long struggle from 1861 to 1865, which ranked in size with any the world had ever before seen, but a few shattered ranks now remain. The old valor yet lives. The old devotion to country, the old loyalty to the flag remain: But the youth and physical vigor which caused them to be characterized as the boys in blue are gone from these heroes of a former generation.

Calvin Coolidge

The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.

The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. … No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself — it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Richard Feynman