Selected youth quotes

1. If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

2. Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.

3. I begin with the young. We older ones are used up but my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at all these men and boys! What material! With you and I, we can make a new world.

4. Most of the people who get sent to die in wars are young men who've got a lot of energy and would probably rather, in a better world, be putting that energy into copulation rather than going over there and blowing some other young man's guts out.

5. The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.

6. When young Mark Robarts was leaving college, his father might well declare that all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition.

7. It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

8. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.

9. When the students are occupied, they're not juvenile delinquents. I believe that education is a capital investment.

10. Come back again, old heart! Ah me! Methinks in those thy coward fears There might, perchance, a courage be, That fails in these the manlier years; Courage to let the courage sink, Itself a coward base to think, Rather than not for heavenly light Wait on to show the truly right.

11. Dance on, dance on, we see, we see Youth goes, alack, and with it glee, A boy the old man ne'er can be; Maternal thirty scarce can find The sweet sixteen long left behind.

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

13. From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.

14. When I was eleven, I just got good.

15. The street's alive as secret debts are paid, Contacts made, they vanished unseen. Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades Hustling for the record machine. The hungry and the hunted explode into rock'n'roll bands That face off against each other out in the street, down in Jungleland.

16. Adolescence is just one big walking pimple.

17. 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.

18. The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

19. Humans are divided between those who can still look through the eyes of youth and those who cannot. Though it causes me frequent pain, I find it very easy to place myself in the shoes of almost any boy, and can conjure my own youth with an ease that is troublesome.

20. The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

21. All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.

22. It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

23. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

24. I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority.

25. Not everyone grows to be old, but everyone has been younger than he is now.

26. The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

27. Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.

28. As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.

29. Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

30. No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

31. I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun.

32. I wanted to talk to very young kids about self-image and about being different and how that can be your strength, especially from the immigrant perspective.

33. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

34. I come fresh from the street, fast on my feet, kind a lean and lazy; not much meat on my bones, and a whole lot alone, and more than a little bit crazy. The old six string was all I had to keep my belly still, and for each full hour lesson I gave I got a crisp ten dollar bill.

35. There are lessons to life That the lovers got to learn There are corners out there You know they're waitin' somewhere And you've got to be prepared to turn There are callouses that come That the lovers got to earn In the years of your youth You can't be fire proof You know you've got to get burned.

36. Youth is the time when hearts are large, And stirring wars Appeal to the spirit which appeals in turn To the blade it draws.

37. The massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

38. Poverty is uncomfortable; but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.

39. Teens are always shown as one dimensional. They're stereotyped. When I was in high school, I cared about more than getting a date or making the team.

40. Sister, look ye, How, by a new creation of my tailor's I've shook off old mortality.

41. It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.

42. I was an uncommonly unattractive young man.

43. The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

44. I keep seeing the Backstreet Boys on TV and all their fans and I'm thinking, I was one of those girls when I was little. Ohmigod.

45. Youth, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

46. Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

47. Perverting the young! As if initiation in sexual pleasure was in itself an act of perversion! In general it is quite the opposite!'

48. There are admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your strength and your youth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself, 'It all depends on me'.

49. For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.

50. People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but it doesn't stop you having your own opinions. Even if people are still very young, they shouldn't be prevented from saying what they think.

51. Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

52. Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

53. In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.

54. What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams ... and we search in vain for their original ... Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

55. Emmy's exquisite youth and her virginal air, Eyes and teeth in the flash of a musical smile, Come to me out of the past, and I see her there As I saw her once for a while.

56. The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end.

57. Then there was a maiden speech, so inaudible, that it was doubted whether, after all, the young orator really did lose his virginity.

58. Genius, when young, is divine.

59. We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.

60. That we may live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy and a privileged and prosperous People, is my Prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion. We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.

61. In whatever he has written he has affected something which has been intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand. Because he has been bright and a man of genius, he has carried his object as regards the young. He has struck them with astonishment and aroused in their imagination ideas of a world more glorious, more rich, more witty, more enterprising, than their own. But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks.

62. The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.

63. We had all awakened X number of years past our youth feeling sleazy and harsh. Choices still existed, but they were no longer infinite. Fun had become a scrim, concealing the hysteria that lay behind it.

64. You only grow old by deserting your ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, giving up wrinkles the soul.

65. 'Susan, I saw you in the classroom today, as the sun came from behind the clouds, a burst of brilliant light caught your hair, it was haloed in front of me. You turned, your eyes flashed fire into my soul, I immediately read the words of Dostoevsky and Karl Marx, and in the words of Albert Schweitzer, I fancy you!' But no, at 13 you're just going, ''Ello Sue: I've got legs. D'ya like: bread? I've got a French loaf. [mimes smacking someone with the loaf and dashing off] Byeee! [high voice] I love you!'

66. Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be.

67. There is a garden in her face Where roses and white lilies blow; A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow: There cherries grow which none may buy Till 'Cherry-ripe' themselves do cry.

68. Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant.

69. All wars are wars among thieves who are too cowardly to fight and therefore induce the young manhood of the whole world to do the fighting for them.

70. Il ne sert a rien d'etre jeune sans etre belle, ni d'etre belle sans etre jeune.

71. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

72. If I grow up I'll be a singer, wearing rings on every finger Not worrying what they or you say, I'll live and love and maybe someday Who knows baby you may comfort me.

73. The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years.

74. I think the popular music has gone truly weird. It's either cutesy-wutesy or it's hard, nasty stuff. It's good that this has life again with the youth.

75. His golden locks time hath to silver turned; O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by encreasing.

76. All of us who served in one war or another know very well that all wars are the glory and the agony of the young.

77. I hope now we will start to work with the young generation. Let them know what was the real exact history at that time. But now everybody is forgetting what we were doing. The same is happening in Britain. The granddaughter of Churchill told me that the young generation there...they don't even know who Churchill is.

78. A man's only as old as the woman he feels.

79. I'm still a kid. I'm like six years old. But it's just a matter of wanting to get up, it's just a big journey. I felt like when I left home that I was on a journey, and I still am.

80. He was a very, very gifted young man. Incredibly talented.

81. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

82. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

83. The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

84. I have found it; I have discovered the cause of all the misfortunes which befell him. A public school, Joseph, was the cause of all the calamaties which he afterwards suffered. Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

85. When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.

86. Now the faith is old and the Devil bold Exceedingly bold indeed. And the masses of doubt that are floating about Would smother a mortal creed. But we that sit in a sturdy youth And still can drink strong ale Let us put it away to infallible truth That always shall prevail. And thank the Lord For the temporal sword And howling heretics too. And all good things Our Christendom brings But especially barley brew!

87. Kings live in Palaces, and Pigs in sties, And youth in Expectation. Youth is wise.

88. Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees. 'Do you believe?' he cried.

89. Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.

90. The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

91. I met a young man of nineteen or twenty, who at that time vibrated with all the youth of the world. This was Jean Cocteau, then a passionately imaginative youth to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City.

92. Age is a sicknesse, and Youth is an ambush.

93. Youth's the season made for joys, Love is then our duty.

94. No young American should be held hostage to America's dependence on oil.

95. They're cheering a young lad, the champion playboy of the Western World.

96. In your teens and your 20s, you're immortal, you're untouchable. It's only later that you begin to realize you are mortal. (2004)

97. The thing is, he came with his guitar to the club. You could cut me open and vomit in my chest because that kid... what a beautiful thing that he shows up with his girl on one arm and his guitar on the other. He came to play and he didn't think he was going to die - nobody thinks they're gonna die. He wanted to have a good time. It's dangerous. But that's the thing that breaks my heart, first that he died, but also that he showed up with his guitar, you know? That's not an unhappy kid. (1995)

98. What a waste. What a waste of a talented, beautiful guy. Obviously, whatever 'it' is, he had it. He was luminous - a brilliant guy with great taste. But on the other side of that, he was a kid, and that can be a dangerous thing to be, especially in that world, being in that position. I was very lucky I pulled out of it, but River - he didn't get out. There was so much ahead for him. Like the beauty and the luxury of making a family. (2003)

99. If you haven't made some mistakes by 28, it's abnormal.

100. The youth of America are rolling up their sleeves, digging their hands in the dough, and making it rise with the sweat of their brows. They realize that there is too much imitation, and that creation holds the key to salvation. 'Create' is the password of this generation. The wine is made from plantain, but even if it turns sour, it is our own wine! That a country's form of government must be in keeping with its natural elements is a foregone conclusion. Absolute ideas must take relative forms if they are not to fail because of an error in form. Freedom, to be viable, has to be sincere and complete. If a republic refuses to open its arms to all, and move ahead with all, it dies.