quotations about youth
A country that betrays its youth is not going to survive.
DIANA FURCHTGOTT-ROTH
"How government policy disfavors the young", MPR News, March 14, 2017
In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Hard are life's early steps; and but that youth is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, men would behold its threshold, and despair.
LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON
Ethel Churchill: or, The Two Brides
Youth as glimpsed by its elders is a story that comes from afar, showing itself as either lovely to look at or a torment to endure.
LEWIS H. LAPHAM
"Fortune's Child", Lapham's Quarterly: Youth
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
speech at University of Cape Town, South Africa, Jun. 6, 1966
Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Difficulty of Being
Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy!
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The young are always in extremes.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Lodore
It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
2010: Odyssey Two
Like the withered roses of a once gay garland, the feelings of youth command in age a melancholy interest.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Youth is the gay and pleasant spring of life, when joy is stirring in the dancing blood, and nature calls us with a thousand songs to share her general feast.
JOSEPH RIDGWAY
attributed, The Classic and the Beautiful from the Literature of Three Thousand Years
It's not simply that youth is full of beauty and energy; it is a time of promise, of possibility, of any number of choose-your-own-adventure stories.
MISS ROSEN
"Take a Sip from the Fountain of Eternal Youth", Crave Online, March 15, 2017
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Youth that is so highly prized passes quickly like a dream; sad and wrinkled old age forthwith impends over our head.
MIMNERMUS
attributed, Day's Collacon
Youth, enthusiasm, and tenderness, are like the days of spring; instead of complaining of their brevity try to enjoy them.
RUCKERT
attributed, Treasury of Thought: Forming an Encyclopedia of Quotations from Ancient and Modern Authors
There is in youth a purity of character which, when once touched and defiled, can never be restored; a fringe more delicate than frost-work, and which, when torn and broken, can never be re-embroidered.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Youth isn't wasted on, or reserved for, the young.
JULIAN KIMBLE
"At Trillectro, youth is not wasted", Washington Post, August 28, 2016
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
ANONYMOUS
O Youth! flame earnest, still aspire,
With energies immortal!
To many a heaven of Desire,
Our yearning opes a portal!
And tho' Age wearies by the way,
And hearts break in the furrow,
We'll sow the golden grain Today--
The Harvest comes tomorrow.
GERALD MASSEY
"Today and Tomorrow"
How much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
letter to his family, Oct. 18, 1918