quotations about youth
She does not simulate youth, and yet she is young. Her smile is as captivating as ever, her laugh as merry and as contagious; and though she can no longer romp with her juniors, she enjoys a vivacious game by proxy as much as she ever did in person, and teases with the same innocent and admirable coquetry. Age has quieted her body but not sobered her spirit. As the life of youth is still hers, so are all its interests. In truth, they have widened with the widening years. As her children have grown up and entered into their several professions, she has accompanied them. Whatever touches their life touches hers, whatever interests them interests her. If she cannot enter into their fields, she can at least come to the fence and look over. So, disavowing all professional knowledge, she is yet singularly intelligent in medicine, law, journalism, theology, and teaching. Her children, when they come home, find her always a ready pupil, and, often to their surprise, their intellectual comrade. Although infirmity begins to put its limitations on her activities, never did life seem to her to be so large, so varied, so full of ever-broadening interest. She occasionally brings out of the past sacred and stimulating memories. But she does not live in the past. She lives in her children, that is in the present, and in her grandchildren, that is in the future.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Home Builder
Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.
FRANK HERBERT
Chapterhouse: Dune
Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Life goes on. Get over it. You're still young. It'll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah.
DAVID LEVITHAN
Marly's Ghost
Youth, what man's age is like to be doth show;
We may our ends by our beginnings know.
JOHN DENHAM
Of Prudence
Youth is the time when hearts are large.
HERMAN MELVILLE
"On the Slain Collegians"
As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth.
CICERO
attributed, Day's Collacon
To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.
MAYA ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The mirror of my youth will never lie.
BARBARA O'SULLIVAN
"The Mirror of My Youth", The Steel Mirror: Sonnets and Poems
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 holds no society with grief.
EURIPIDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
The period of youth is the glory of nature, and the healthful development of all the resources of strength deposited in our nature is the glory of youth.
ELIAS LYMAN MAGOON
Proverbs for the people: or, Illustrations of practical godliness drawn from the Book of Wisdom
You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
TIMOTHY LEARY
attributed, Office Yoga: Simple Stretches for Busy People
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
In the days of thy youth seek to obtain that which shall compensate the losses of thy old age.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite--so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!
SAMUEL ULLMAN
"Youth", The Silver Treasury, Prose and Verse for Every Mood
Youth is not a time of life--it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.
SAMUEL ULLMAN
"Youth", The Silver Treasury, Prose and Verse for Every Mood
What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
MARY KARR
Lit
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Over the trackless past, somewhere,
Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
Only regained by faith and prayer,
Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
Each lost day has its patron saint!
BRET HARTE
"The Lost Galleon"