Quotes, quotations and nice thoughts on youth

Youth never disappears,
for it is still in harmony
with the Divine.

Alexandre Dumas

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity. Samuel Johnson

In the middle of a conversation, she'll frequently say something like, "Young people are heartless, they don't have any respect anymore." I nod agreement in hopes that she'll stop right there, but secretly I'm convinced that the heart is the same as it's always been; there's simply less hypocrisy, that's all. Young people aren't naturally selfish, any more than old folks are naturally wise. Your age doesn't have anything to do with whether you're sensitive or shallow; it's a question of the path your life takes. Susanna Tamaro People are always talking about the joys of youth—but, oh, how youth can suffer! May Sarton

Youth, though it may lack knowledge, is certainly not devoid of intelligence; it sees through shams with sharp and terrible eyes. H. L. Mencken

Don't laugh at youth for their affectations; they are only trying on one face after another to find their own. Logan P. Smith

The young do not know enough to be prudent,
and therefore they attempt the impossible--
and achieve it, generation after generation.

Pearl S. Buck

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I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird
that has broken out of the egg.

James M. Barrie

You stay young as long as you can learn,
acquire new habits, and suffer contradictions.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

The arrogance of age must submit
to be taught by youth.

Edmund Burke

Through our great good fortune, in our youth our
hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn
at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Youth is not a question of years:
one is young or old from birth.

Natalie Clifford Barney

The best way to keep young is to keep going in whatever it is that keeps you going.
With me that's work, and a lot of it. And when a job is finished, relax and have fun.

Ingrid Bergman

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

George Bernard Shaw

It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music,
and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities
that lie within the human spirit--enable them to see visions and dream dreams.

Eric Anderson

Youth
Samuel Ullman

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter
of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of
the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions;
it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

   Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over
timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease.
This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty.
Nobody grows old merely by a number of years.
We grow old by deserting our ideals.

   Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm
wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the
heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

   Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's
heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of
what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center
of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long
as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and
power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.

   When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with
snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown
old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the
waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.

Herbert Henry Asquith

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than
for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.

Francis Bacon

Young people are apt to think themselves wise enough,
as drunken people are apt to think themselves sober enough.

Lord Chesterfield

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old person in him or her,
so I am no less pleased with an old person that has something of the youth.
They that follow this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Marcus Cicero

The young always have the same problem -- how to rebel and conform
at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their
parents and copying one another.

Quentin Crisp

Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor.

Euripides

It takes a long time to become young.

Pablo Picasso

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable
for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season,
and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Samuel Butler

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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy.
It's probably because they have forgotten their own.

Margaret Atwood

I was forced to live far beyond my years when just a child, now I
have reversed the order and I intend to remain young indefinitely.

Mary Pickford

Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. You are as old
as your doubt, your fear, your despair. The way to keep young
is to keep your faith young. Keep your self-confidence young.
Keep your hope young.

Luella F. Phean

Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment,
the spark that you always carry in your heart.

Raisa Gorbachev

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty
or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The
greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

Henry Ford

Would you remain always young, and would you carry all the joyousness and buoyancy of youth into your maturer years? Then have care concerning but one thing, — how you live in your thought world. It was the inspired one, Gautama, the Buddha, who said, — "The mind is everything; what you think you become." And the same thing had Ruskin in mind when he said, — "Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us as yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought — proof against all adversity." And would you have in your body all the elasticity, all the strength, all the beauty of your younger years? Then live these in your mind, making no room for unclean thought, and you will externalize them in your body. In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body. And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind the same as mind helps body.

Ralph Waldo Trine
"Thought I Met on the Highway"

I listened, in my youth, to conversations between grown-up
people through which there breathed a tone of sorrowful
regret which repressed the heart. The speakers looked back
at the idealism and capacity for enthusiasm of their youth as
something precious to which they ought to have held fast,
and yet at the same time they regarded it as almost a law of
nature that no one should be able to do so. This woke in me
a dread of having ever, even once, to look back on any past
with such a feeling; I resolved never to let myself become
subject to this tragic domination of mere reason, and what
I thus vowed in almost boyish defiance I have tried to carry out.

Albert Schweitzer