quotations about youth
You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.
SAUL BELLOW
Seize the Day
Oh happy youth! life's oasis of beauty!
What time in after years so pure and sweet?
Free from the lab'ring progress of great manhood,
It treads life's pathway with elastic feet!
C. B. LANGSTON
"Youth"
My salad days;
When I was green in judgment.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Antony and Cleopatra
In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established--Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.
RANDOLPH BOURNE
"Youth", The Atlantic Monthly, April 1912
Youth without beauty is half a prize.
G. WHITE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Youth is often a scoffer at destiny.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819
When you're young, you think you can handle anything. By the time you find out otherwise, it's already too late. You got a stocking wrapped around your neck.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Dance, Dance, Dance
When beautiful youth is gone, not much of life remains.
G. ULTHORN
attributed, Day's Collacon
A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Since time immemorial, youth has set the universal standard of physical beauty, and the reason is simply that a shapely firm young face and body are more attractive sexually and aesthetically than bulges, sags and wrinkles.
HUGH HEFNER
Playboy, Jan. 1974
We are young only once, after that we need some other excuse.
ANONYMOUS
The ship of youth crowds sail; but if the wind forsakes it, the canvas hangs motionless, awaiting a friendly breath; and too often illusions are summoned to its aid.
MME. SWETCHINE
The Writings of Madame Swetchine
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it.
JON KRAKAUER
Into the Wild
Youth has needs, I know,
And headlong yearnings like the mountain streams
That rush adown the nearest path they find
To meet the sounding river.
ANNA KATHERINE GREEN
"Womanhood"
Youth is the time when hearts are large.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"On the Slain Collegians"
A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?
CONFUCIUS
The Wisdom of Confucius
Youth is the golden period of life, and every well-spent moment will be like good seed planted in an auspicious season.
ELIZA COOK
Eliza Cook's Journal
Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor;
Part with it as with money, sparing; pay
No moment but in purchase of its worth,
And what it's worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts