youth Quotes

“Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.”

“Pan, who and what art thou?” he cried huskily. “I’m youth, I’m joy,” Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”

“I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day -- mock me horribly!”

“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.”

“Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.”

“Sorrow never stays punishment. But remember, Bagheera, he is very little.”

“What degradation lay in being young.”

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

“Those girls are on the road to trouble,” I heard an older woman say about us one night, as we were staggering down the street drunk—and that woman was absolutely right. What she didn’t understand, though, is that trouble is what we wanted. Oh, our youthful needs! Oh, the deliciously blinding yearnings of the young—which inevitably take us right to the edges of cliffs, or trap us in cul-de-sacs of our design.”

“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.”

“The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.”

“Rejoice in thy youth,” said the sunbeam; “rejoice in thy fresh growth, and the young life that is in thee.”

“I know nothing of that place,” said the fir-tree, “but I know the wood where the sun shines and the birds sing.” And then the tree told the little mice all about its youth. They had never heard such an account in their lives; and after they had listened to it attentively, they said, “What a number of things you have seen? you must have been very happy.”

A wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young.

“He that hath a beard is more than a youth; and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me; and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.”

“Sit by my side, and let the world slip: we shall ne’er be younger.”

“She said nothing, and Sir Andrew too was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.”

“Would that I were still young and strong as I was in those days, for then some one of you swineherds would give me a cloak both out of good will and for the respect due to a brave soldier; but now people look down upon me because my clothes are shabby.”

Free thinkers at seventeen!

We that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

“But the youth of today were a pasty lot, with none of the get-up-and-go, none of the vigor and vim that he remembered from the days when he was young”

“If I but had my true youth again why, in the dawn of the world I could transform mountains into seas and clouds into palaces. I could populate cities with the pebbles on the shingle. If I were young again...”

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”

″‘The new one is the most beautiful of all; he is so young and pretty.’ And the old swans bowed their heads before him.”

“Thus did 13,400 of America’s finest youth, who had been training for this moment for two years, hurl themselves against Hitler’s Fortress Europe.”

″‘Could you just call me Pigeon?’ he asked the teacher when she read his name. ‘Does your mother call you Pigeon?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then to me you are Paul.’ ... ‘Nathan Sutter,’ the teacher read. ‘My mother never calls me Nathan.’ ‘Is it Nate?’ ‘She calls me Honeylips.‘”

“The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it. So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”

Although they were old stairs, the worn moons in the middle of each step were not very deep. The marble must be unusually hard. That seemed very likely, only too likely, although with all my thought about these stairs this exceptional hardness had not occurred to me. It was surprising that I had overlooked that, that crucial fact

“Phineas was a poor deceiver, having had no practice.”

“It’s a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It’s accurate but it isn’t profound.”

“Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines.”

“Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”

“He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded. At his father’s urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games – football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit.”

″‘You are young,’ replied Athos, ‘and your bitter recollections have time to be changed into sweet remembrances.‘”

“Never slow down, never look back, live each day with adolescent verve and spunk and curiosity and playfulness.”

“He smiles at me, and I suddenly am seventeen again—the year I realized love doesn’t follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable.”

“Of course, you’re very young… you haven’t got to that yet. But it does come! The blessed relief when you know that you’ve done with it all—that you haven’t got to carry the burden any longer. You’ll feel that too, someday….”

″‘Wisdom is sometimes given to the young, as well as to the old,’ he said; ‘and what you have spoken is wise, not to call it by a better word.‘”

“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.”

“In profile, he could see both the young woman she was becoming and the little girl he remembered.”

“God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself.”

“In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth.”

“I watched him go, looking old and tired, and wondered for a minute what on earth we were doing up here. We weren’t boys anymore.”

It occurred to me that we will never be young again.

“I see the damage and pain of hard years. I see the emptiness and desperation of existence without hope. I see a young life that has been too long.”

“Sometimes he wished he had no ambitions—often wondered where they had come from in his life, because he remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had—a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved.”

“I draw no distinction between young in years, and youthful in temper and disposition.”

“Honestly, I just wanted to take it easy for the rest of the day. I didn’t want to hear Spoony preach about how hard it is to be black, or my father preach about how young people lack pride and integrity, making us easy targets.”

“There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

“For when youth passes with its giddy train, Troubles on troubles follow, toils on toils, Pain, pain for ever pain; And none escapes life’s coils. Envy, sedition, strife, Carnage and war, make up the tale of life. Last comes the worst and most abhorred stage Of unregarded age, Joyless, companionless and slow.”

“There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it evident that the personal charms which Tess could boast were in main part her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.”

“So wise so young, they say, do never live long.”

“The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.”

″‘Curiosity,‘said the mayor. ‘A dangerous quality. Unhealthy. Especially regrettable in one so young.‘”

“His father’s whistle, his mother’s mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth.”

“– Ah, it’s a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and you’ll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how it has changed you.”

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.”

“I am a teenage boy aflame with health, strong and virile and pounding with energy. But I get older. Every second ages me. [...] Each death around me adds a decade. Each atrocity, each tragedy, each small moment of sadness. Soon I will be ancient.”

″‘No weapon formed against me will ever prosper. I will live out my days in good health, with a clear mind, with good memory, with clarity of thought. My mind is alert. My senses are sharp. My youth is being renewed.’ You must prophesy health. Prophesy a long, productive life. Your words will become your reality.”

“Then the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally; but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.”

“Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

“Every man should lose a battle in his youth, so he does not lose a war when he is old.”

“Well, one can’t get over the habit of being a little girl all at once.”

“So why not mercy and justice to sweet youth from an omnipotent and benevolent Creator? There are only three answers. He is not omnipotent, or he is not benevolent, or-the dreariest possibility of all-he is inattentive. What if that was what happened to my nephew? That God’s gaze had merely strayed elsewhere?”

“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere.”

“To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable and all open; There is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.”

“His youth and features favoured the disguise, And should you ask how she, a Sultan’s bride, Could risk or compass such strange phantasies, This I must leave sultanas to decide.”

“It is enough that Fortune found him flush Of Youth, and Vigour, Beauty, and those things Which for an instant clip Enjoyment’s wings.”

“The favour of the Empress was agreeable; And though the duty waxed a little hard, Young people at his time of life should be able To come off handsomely in that regard.”

“What is important when you are young, is to train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy.”

“But for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure.”

“There’s too much risk in loving,’ the young boy said, ‘no,’ said the old man, ‘there’s too much risk in not.”

“Even the strongest and bravest must sometimes weep. It shows they have a great heart, one that can show compassion for others. You are brave, Matthias. Already you have done great things for one so young. I am only a simple country-bred fieldmouse, but even I can see the courage and the leadership in you.”

“Go back to school. Go back to your life. And the next time they ask you, say no. Killing is for grown-ups and you’re still a child.”

“I was real happy and carefree and young...”

″‘You ruined everything!’ Sayle howled. ‘How did you do it? How did you trick me? I’d have beaten you if you’d been a man!‘”

“You’re never too young to die.”

Over the course of the novel, the youth methodically destroys each piece of memorabilia from his relationship with Ann-Katrin, whom he thinks of as Heart’s Delight (it is also another name for the lemon balm plant she grows in her bedroom).

“With each gleaning I commit, with each life taken for the good of humanity, I mourn for the boy I once was, whose name I sometimes struggle to remember. And I long for a place beyond immortality where I can, in some small measure, resurrect the wonder, and be that boy again.”

“Why must the young die and the old wrecks go on living? Why do little children die? I shall never, never forgive God for that, do you hear?”

“The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up.”

″ I have been up and down the stairs all day. I cooked a big dinner for them tonight: two poached eggs with beans, and tinned semolina pudding. (t is a good job I wore the green lurex apron because the poached eggs escaped out of the pan and got all over me.)”

“My father proved you don’t have to be a grown-up to change the Wizarding World.”

“We cannot protect the young from harm. Pain must and will come.”

″ ‘Humphrey, my good boy,’ said Jacob, ‘recollect, that in the midst of life we are in death, that there is no security for young or old. You or your brother may be cut off in your youth; one may be taken, and the other left. Recollect, your sisters depend on you, and do not therefore be rash.”

“This gave him peace and hope, that anything he’d missed out on when he married Rachel so young was still there, waiting. That other people had screwed up and were starting over, too.”

“It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence;”

“He was called Smith and was twelve years old. Which, in itself, was a marvel; for it seemed as if the smallpox, the consumption, the brain-fever, jail-fever and even the hangman’s rope had given him a wide berth for fear of catching something.”

“I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck anymore what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today!”

“Mum won’t let me keep a rabbit, She won’t let me keep a bat. She won’t let me keep a porcupine, or a water-rat. ”

It introduces kids to the world of painting and especially to Claude Monet. Everything is explained in a simple way and the pictures are lovely.

The accompanying illustrations, they are bright, descriptive and totally capture not only Linnea’s joy and and delightfully bubbly personality, they also present a glowing visual homage to France and to Monet’s garden in Giverny.

″‘Well, this was a brave youth,’ said Pellinore, ‘and if he lives, will be a mighty knight.‘”

“My uncle was then in his first youth, the age in which confused feelings, not yet sifted, all rush into good and bad, the age in which every new experience, even macabre and inhuman, is palpitating and warm with love of life.”

“But when they want to file a complaint, they only get to hear that this is a minor case because they have no real evidence. It’s one word against the other. The desperate Niklas cannot expect any help against Karl from the police.”

“What struck Tom’s youthful imagination was the desperate and lawless character of most of the stories. Was the guard hoaxing him? He couldn’t help hoping that they were true. It’s very odd how almost all English boys love danger. You can get ten to join a game, or climb a tree, or swim a stream, when there’s a chance of breaking their limbs or getting drowned, for one who’ll stay on level ground, or in his depth, or play quoits or bowls.”

“Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, It made on Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes; Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth, Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth, Attempted to Believe Matilda: The effort very nearly killed her, And would have done so, had not She Discovered this Infirmity.”

“And girls do want boys who are interesting. Girls want the shy geeks who know everything and have big hands and good teeth and say sweet things.”

“Wine: it’s what’s for dinner,” Elliot said with a laugh.”

“I give myself three more seconds to look at him and it’s like another punch to the gut. He’s my person. He’s always been my person. My best friend, my confidant, probably the love of my life.”

“It’s hard for me sometimes that we aren’t together. I never know where the lines are. I want to cross them all the time. ”

“Rossamund had seen had seen them before. In them he knew women kept their rouges, blushes and balms: the tools of beauty ... even a young lad like himself could not help but be amazed by the simple yet profound transformation. He did not think a little rosying of the cheeks and lips and whitening of the nose could be so flattering.”

Besides, young men like to feel that there is a young woman not very far away.

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

“I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young; and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth.”

I,—a man of thought,—the bookworm of great libraries,—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge,—what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own!

It was bitter cold in the morning, she dropped her precious turnover in the gutter, Aunt March had an attack of the fidgets, Meg was sensitive, Beth would look grieved and wistful when she got home, and Amy kept making remarks about people who were always talking about being good and yet wouldn’t even try when other people set them a virtuous example.

“Let me be a little girl as long as I can.”

Any young girl can imagine Amy’s state of mind when she ‘took the stage’ that night, leaning on Laurie’s arm. She knew she looked well, she loved to dance, she felt that her foot was on her native heath in a ballroom, and enjoyed the delightful sense of power which comes when young girls first discover the new and lovely kingdom they are born to rule by virtue of beauty, youth, and womanhood.

At your age we have faith in life; it is the privilege of youth to believe and hope, but old men see death more clearly.

The fowl was tender, the wine old, the fire clear and sparkling, and Andrea was surprised to find himself eating with as good an appetite as though nothing had happened. Then he went to bed and almost immediately fell into that deep sleep which is sure to visit men of twenty years of age, even when they are torn with remorse. Now, here we are obliged to own that Andrea ought to have felt remorse, but that he did not.

“You’d be but a fierce young hound indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint is!”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father’s exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that member of the family.

“Five minutes ago Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being;

He did not know that his mode of behavior in relation to Kitty had a definite character, that it is courting young girls with no intention of marriage, and that such courting is one of the evil actions common among brilliant young men such as he was. It seemed to him that he was the first who had discovered this pleasure, and he was enjoying his discovery.

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”

“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“Well, sir, it is young; but he is as steady as a man, and is strong, and well grown, and though he has not had much experience in driving, he has a light firm hand and a quick eye, and he is very careful, and I am quite sure no horse of his will be ruined for want of having his feet and shoes looked after.”

“And so,” she said, “here we are, ruined in the prime of our youth and strength, you by a drunkard, and I by a fool; it is very hard.”