Teenage years

“ Only after I had observed that several very fair persons, who happened, to pass near me, had gray hair, did I notice that the bloom of youth still glows upon the faces of those who are 35 to 40 years of age! ”

“ Not the girls alone, but those who teach and guide them, are young, young in the way which defies the passing of years to make them old. We are not young because we have seen eighteen summers and no more, or old, because we have seen eighty. ”

“ But boy as he was in years, he showed a firmness of character, a grasp of the principles which should rule his conduct, and a persistence in following them which could not have been excelled at any age. It was a time, perhaps, when age was less afraid of youth than it is at present. ”

“ Of the friends of those years, how many have passed to keep the ultimate term in the valley of the shadow? how many have sickness and failure struck down to poverty and to oblivion? how many has destiny carried to the distant places of the earth, where, in the leisure of emprise they recall the voices for ever still, the hands they nevermore will touch? Well for the freshman that he can put from him this day of the reckonings of affection. ”

“ But between childhood and youth there comes a trying period when the child has become well cognizant of the practical world, but has as yet no hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen, for instance, one has the world pretty well charted, but not yet has the slow chemistry of time transmuted this experience into meanings and values. There is a crassness and materiality about the following three or four years that have no counterpart until youth is over and the sleek years of the forties have begun. How cocksure and familiar with the world is the boy or girl at this age! ”

“ Is a young man of twenty going to listen to the impotent man of sixty who mutters: 'Young man, the charms of woman are a snare and an illusion. When you have reached my age you will be no longer moved by them.' For that is where the 'when you are my age, young man,' argument finally lands us. And it is not fair to say to a boy of seventeen: 'This mad excitement about games is absurd. In six years even you will have outgrown it.' It is for us to decide whether this mad excitement is the natural expression of a boy's temperament, or whether it is the peculiar growth of a peculiar environment. ”

“ It is good to have been young in youth, and, as the years go, to grow younger. ‘Many,’ it is written, ‘are already old before they are through their teens; but to travel deliberately through one’s ages is to get the heart out of a liberal education. ”

“ Have you ever known any of these indefatigable young students, born in the humblest ranks, who spend upon their arid labour their ten, their twenty best years of life, without a thought or a care for the pleasures of their age or the passing day?—youthful stoics who march with firm step, and alone, towards an end which, alas! ”

“ The years of adolescence in the male are characterised by an impulse to travel, to adventures, but in addition to all kinds of ideal efforts and to religious activity. The loftiest ethical ideas alternate with a self-conscious bumptiousness. ”

“ At the beginning of the period of childhood for which the Junior Course is intended, approximately nine years of age, there appears to be in the life of the normal boy or girl a real transition as the traits and interests of earlier years give way to those of full fledged boyhood and girlhood. Strange premonitions of impending physical and mental changes now appear, with suggestions of riper years that are rapidly approaching. The physical and mental changes of this period are accompanied by an awakening of social consciousness. ”

“ We are of opinion, then, that Youth is completed in the forty-fifth year.
And as Adolescence is in the twenty-five years which proceed mounting upwards to Youth: so the descent, that is, Old Age, is an equal amount of time which succeeds to Youth; and thus Old Age terminates in the seventieth year. ”

“ Student life is perhaps the best of all fields, unworked though it is, for studying the natural history of adolescence. Its modern record is over eight hundred years old and it is marked with the signatures of every age, yet has essential features that do not vary. ”

“ Does not this rightly imply that between childhood and boyhood is fixed a perceptible gulf, physical, spiritual, psychological, and that in minds in which the powers and tendencies conspicuous in boyhood, and more or less dormant or latent in earlier years, predominate, those of childhood are apt to fade and fall away? ”

“ Lest we should seem to be placing too much emphasis upon adolescence, with the idea that the mere passing of that period will lead to change in behavior, we cite Cases 3, 5, and 6, where the addition of years has brought no betterment. ”

“ Among these examinations were full sets of the questions used for entrance to the high school for the last twelve years, and every one of these was given to the class in hand. The children of the sixties must have been tough little things, for not one of them had nervous prostration. ”

“ This is what our pious friends mean when they say, "Give me the child until he is ten years old and you may have him afterward." That is, they can take the child in his plastic age and make impressions on his mind that are indelible. ”

“ Very early in her teens the girl begins to pencil upon her face the first tiny lines which in later years, grown deep and heavy, will mark her discontent. There are so few faces that show their owners have learned to be content. ”

“ YOUTH, or Adolescence, in general, is that happy period of human life, which commences from childhood; continues as long as the fibres increase in dimensions or firmness; and terminates at full growth: among the Romans, it was computed from the age of 12 to 25, in males, and to 21, in females. In modern times, the term adolescence, includes the age of from 15 to 25 years, and sometimes to 30. ”

“ Then when the first years of adolescence with their hot impulses are past, and a temporary calm sets in, they experience a new desire, which is that they may enter into the full possession of their own being before beginning to raise a new generation. ”

“ It is the period of altruism, love, and vocation. The period of early adolescence is egoistic; this period is ego-social, and strongly altruistic. This change in the unfolding nature of youth opens the interest to stories of self-sacrifice, heroic service and love even for enemies. These stories could not be appreciated in so keen a way before. This altruistic interest normally awakens several years earlier in girls than in boys. ”

“ The interests of the adolescent boy are general and not specialized between the twelfth and eighteenth years. The boy gets his impressions of the community objectively, in addition to increasing his knowledge of the external world through his acquaintanceship with its phenomena. The Universe and the Community are extensive and many sided. The step also between twelve and eighteen years is short. The boy's contact with these, then, must be rapid and general. ”

“ The first five years of growth, the infantile period, is of enormous importance for later development. In this phase the whole personality takes the shape and develops the characteristics that will distinguish it from that time on. ”

“ THE more we live, more brief appear
⁠Our life's succeeding stages:
A day to childhood seems a year,
⁠And years like passing ages. ”

“ They have compiled a list for me of men fulfilling the necessary qualifications—young men round about the age of thirty, of more or less nondescript appearance, and with a gift for playing character parts—men, moreover, who have definitely left the stage within the last three years. ”

“ From this age to the condition of adult life, the intellectual faculties develop according to the surroundings of the individual, while, on the emotional side, reverence, remorse, and courtesy make their appearance at about the age of five years, and melancholy and ecstasy at about the tenth year. ”

“ The boy’s school life soon begins to develop self-reliance, full of possibilities, of curiosity and questionings, the period of formation of thoughts, feelings and desires. And when a boy reaches that stage in his life when he is permitted to go down town alone—he at once begins a new life. ”

“ "Childhood is the time of man's greatest content," said Ak, following the youth's thoughts. "'Tis during these years of innocent pleasure that the little ones are most free from care." ”

“ This relates to the power they exercise in forming the characters of young children. The period of life from infancy to twelve years old, is the time in which the foundations of future character are laid. ”

“ Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period—in the early teens. At this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before. ”

“ There Was a Child Went Forth There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. ”

“ She was now forty years of age, childless, and with that inordinate passion for pleasure which is the secret of remaining young. ”

“ These vessels of verse, O Great Goddess, are filled with invisible tears,
With the sobs and sweat of my spirit and her desolate brooding for years;
See, I lay them — not on thine altar, for they are unpolished and plain,
Not rounded enough by the potter, too much burnt in the furnace of pain;
But here in the dust, in the shadow, with a sudden wild leap of the heart
I kneel to tenderly kiss them, then in silence arise to depart.
I linger awhile at the portal with the light of the crimsoning sun
On my wreathless brow bearing the badges of battles I've fought in not won. ”

“ The dark of the bush on the sidings, the snow-crested mountains that loom
Golden and grey in the sunlight, far up in the cloud-fringed blue,
Are the threads with old memory weaving and the line of my life
running through;
And the wind of the morning calling has ever a song for me
Of hope for the land of the dawning in the golden years to be. ”

“ COLD in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Sever'd at last by Time's all-severing wave?
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern-leaves cover
Thy noble heart for ever, ever more?
Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers
From those brown hills have melted into spring:
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering! ”

“ Abides for ever! Evermore the wind
Is thy august companion; and thy peers
Are cloud, and thunder, and the face sublime
Of blue mid-heaven! On thy awful brow
Is Deity; and in that voice of thine
There is the great imperial utterance
Of God for ever; and thy feet are set
Where evermore, through all the days and years,
There rolls the grand hymn of the deathless wave.
Araluen
Take this rose, and very gently place it on the tender, deep
Mosses where our little darling, Araluen, lies asleep. ”

“ The pride and the strength of adolescence are his—audacity and endurance, swift passions and exquisite sensibilities, the alternations of sublime repose and boyish noise, grace, pliancy, and stubbornness and power, love of all fair things and radiant in the world, the frank enjoyment of the open air, free merriment, and melancholy well beloved. Of these adolescent qualities, of this clear and stainless personality, this conscience whole and pure and reconciled to nature, what survives among us now? ”

“ The adolescent stage of life has long seemed to me one of the most fascinating of all themes, more worthy, perhaps, than anything in the world of reverence, most inviting study, and in most crying need of a service we do not yet understand how to render aright. ”

“ Hellas
THE world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star;
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. ”

“ The period of adolescence here assumes the prominence that childhood has in the psychological study preparatory to teaching in lower schools. This is the period of beginnings, the beginning of a more ambitious and generous life, a life having the future wrapped up in it; a transition period, of mental storm and stress, in which egoism gives way to altruism, romance has charm, and the social, moral, and religious feelings bud and bloom. ”

“ When she heard him sing and whistle in the woods that afternoon, she had thought him a young man. There was the joyousness and buoyancy of youth in his looks and voice. To-night, however, she saw that he was not a boy, but a man fully her own age. ”

“ She could not but see the black depths of disintegration in his eyes, the sudden glance upon her, as if she could save him, as if he would reveal himself.
And how could age save youth? Youth must go to youth. ”

“ Young, he is, of course, and still awaiting the development which life's deeper experiences are to bring, but nevertheless he is not again to taste the joy, the zest, or the enthusiasm which come to careless boyhood. ”

“ Age tempers youth. Youth animates age. The senior with refined experience, the junior with the flush and fervour of opening life, conjoined in pastoral work, must surely to all appear a beautiful ideal. ”

“ We stood to each other from boyhood upwards in every possible relation, whether of an educational, warlike, delicate, or social character, which the warm and fitful feelings peculiar to boyhood and youth can produce. ”