Youth

“ Youth! You glorious dawn of Mankind! You bright, happy, glowing morning Sun; not at full brilliancy of noon, I know, but unavoidably on your way! Youth! How I do thrill at taking your warm, soft hand; walking with you ”

“ Youth, the flower before it has decayed into the mellow moss of age. Youth that knows not itself or the world. Youth that laughs at tears and weeps at laughter. Youth that paints queer pictures at which the critics smile. Illogical youth; arrogant youth; forever annoying the world’s stagnation. Youth capering like a fawn in the altar places of the holy. ”

“ And ever they came, more and more youngsters—Youth unquenchable and irresistible— and ever they put the old uns away, themselves becoming old uns and travelling the same downward path, while behind them, ever pressing on them, was Youth eternal—the new babies, grown lusty and dragging their elders down, with behind them more babies to the end of time—Youth that must have its will and that will never die. ”

“ As this story has shown, Youth, if adults will only admit that it has any brains at all, will stand out, today, in a most promising light. Philosophically, Youth is Wisdom in formation, and with many thoughts startling to adult minds; and, industrially, this vast World’s coming stability is now, today, in its hands; growing slowly, as a blossom grows from its bud. ”

“ Youth, however, was the truth of him. The inspiration, the freshness, the simplicity of outlook—these were the dominating elements in his character, and they were altogether compact of youth. He looked upon the world with expectant eyes and an unfaltering faith. ”

“ And oh, youth!—take my word of it,—youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepid ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming hedgerows. ”

“ Nor is the season of Youth therefore to be pitied—for Passion respires and expires in bliss ineffable, and so far from being eloquent as the unwise lecture, it is mute as a fish, and merely gasps. In Youth we are the creatures, the slaves of the senses. ”

“ Youth will be youth. I loved and I indulged the hope that the dark clouds around me would turn out a bright lining. I forgot that in the land of my birth the shadows are too dense for light to penetrate. ”

“ And it is meet that youth should do this—youth, whose very nature it is to be redundant with the rills of life, and fruitful in joy, and redolent in bloom, from the perpetual flowing forth of its own glad waters—youth, which is so rich in all that gladdens, and exhilarates ”

“ Strong erect young men, sons of America, who perceive, with the clearness of the spirit, the problems of the future and who, with the red blood of youth coursing in their veins and the glow of enthusiasm lingering in their eyes, will take up the task of solving them. ”

“ Days of first youth; youth's high impressions of great and lovely things; all the innocent, stingless joys of art and travel, of happy talk and ripening faculty, of pure ambitions, hero-worships, compassions, shared and mutually enkindled: these were for ever intertwined with their thoughts of each other. ”

“ Youth, like the extremity of age, had effaced the strongly marked characteristics of middle life, and mutually assimilated them all. They were a group of merry youngsters, almost maddened with the exuberant frolic someness of their years. ”

“ That the youth of every nation—
⁠Be they near or far away—
Have especial delectation
⁠In that gladsome roundelay.
Their eyes grow bright and brighter
⁠Their lungs begin to crow,
Their hearts get light and lighter,
⁠And their cheeks are all aglow ”

“ Youth enters the big world of acting and thinking, a huge bundle of susceptibilities, keenly alive and plastic, and so eager to achieve and perform that it will accept almost the first opportunity that comes to it. Now each youth has his own unique personality and interweaving web of tendencies and inclinations, such as no other person has ever had before. ”

“ I have given the future of you young people the most careful consideration, because it is for the future that you must now prepare. Youth is the time of preparation. It is the building time. As we sow in youth, so we reap in age—huh. ”

“ I have maintained myself rather clumsily for the most part, yet at times not without a certain degree of skill.
All my books are youthful books; they express turbulence; perhaps their youth is a youth which is lacking in force and vigour, but nevertheless, they are youthful books. ”

“ And it is for this youth that you will sacrifice your fortunes, your ambition, the station you were born to fill and have been reared to improve,—this youth in whom there is nothing but the lap-dog’s merit, sleekness and beauty! ”

“ And youth feels so glorious a vigor in the sense of its own strength, though the world be before and—against it! Removed from that chilling counting-house—from the imperious will of a patron and master—all friendless, but all independent—the young adventurer felt a new being—felt his grand nature as Man. And on the Man rushed the genius long interdicted—and thrust aside—rushing back, with the first breath of adversity to console—no! ”

“ So, now a youth, he is walking as when a child among flowers, and the leader of the boys in their most venturesome sports is kneeling in adoring silence over beds of pansies and 97asters, and feeding the hunger of his soul with the beauty of their forms and colors. ”

“ These are a type of the world of Age.
Envoy
Struggle and turmoil, revel and brawl—
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
A smouldering hearth and a silent stage—
These are a type of the world of Age. ”

“ The old saying is the truest philosophy of youth: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” How impossible for a youth who is really young to plan his life consciously! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The youth sees a pretty face, reads a noble book, hears a stirring appeal for a cause, meets a charming friend, gets fired with the concept of science, or of social progress, becomes attracted to a profession,—the emotion that fixes his enthusiasm and lets out a flood of emotion in that direction, and lifts him into another world, is the same in every case. Youth glories in the sudden servitude, is content to let the new master lead wherever he will; and is as surprised as any one at the momentous and startling results. Youth is vulnerable at every point. ”

“ How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies? The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible gayety, bitter melancholy,—all these moods are equally part of that showery springtime of life. ”

“ New movements are born in young minds, and lack of experience enables youth eternally to recall civilization to sound bases. The passing generation smiles and cracks its weather-worn jokes about youthful effusions: but this new, ever-hopeful, ever-daring, ever-doing, youthful enthusiasm, ever returning to the logical bases of religion, ethics, politics, business, [Pg 17] art, and social life,—this is the salvation of the world. ”

“ And can it be called strange that the feelings, the thoughts, and emotions of our youth should come welling up from the long past, or that with the return of boyish emotions, the language and actions of boyhood should be indulged in again? ”

“ Youth enters freshly and gayly upon its untried career, and not all the failures of the thousands, and tens of thousands who have already erred and strayed from the right path, have power to damp the ardor and the hope with which it eagerly pursues each object of desire. ”

“ The most irresistible charm of youth is its bubbling enthusiasm. Youth sees no darkness ahead,—no defile that has no outlet,—it forgets that there is such a thing as failure in the world, and believes that mankind has been waiting all these centuries for him to come and be the liberator of truth and energy and beauty. ”

“ YOUTH is the season when habits are most easily formed; when principles are most permanently established. That knowledge which expands the soul, and enlarges its capacity for happiness, is more easily acquired at the period of youth ”

“ The ideas of the young are the living, the potential ideas; those of the old, the dying, or the already dead. This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical, but even more radical, than it would naturally be. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If we thus discern in the sentiments and faculties of youth the animating [Pg 2] and impelling soul of historical events,—if, wherever in history we mark a great movement of humanity, we commonly detect a young man at its head or at its heart,—we must still, I admit, discriminate between youth and young men, between the genial action of youthful qualities and the imperfections and perversions of youthful character. ”

“ Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others. ”

“ Perhaps with that expansion youth will finally effect a reconciliation with life of those two supremest and most poignant of adventures: the thoughts that cluster around sex, and the fears and hopes that cluster around death, the one the gateway into life, the other out of it. ”

“ Oh, sweet youth, how soon it fades!
Sweet joys of youth, how fleeting! ”

“ From the multiplication table to the highest cultural studies in college, the youth is to be adjusted to the material of our civilization without any concession to the emasculating desire to adjust civilization simply to the particular youth. ”

“ And this is the tragedy, I suppose, of all the ill-favored and unattractive to a greater or less degree; the world of youth is a world of so many conventions, and the abnormal in any direction is so glaringly and hideously abnormal. ”

“ It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas, and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. ”

“ 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! ”

“ This was, perhaps, because he never grew to manhood, He requests all but youthful readers to abstain from one of his papers, and explains that 'youthful' includes some 'from the age of twelve to that of four-score years and ten.' Youth is 'something in the soul which has no more to do with the colour of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.' No one has ever insisted upon that text so emphatically and persistently. ”

“ There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. ”

“ Some say we ought never to refer to such things to corrupt the minds of the young. Such people are so simple-minded, as to have forgotten all about the inquisitiveness or the passions of their own youth. The young! They know too much, taught by the example of their elders and the vicious stories in novels, of the intrigues and seductions in society life. They are attracted, allured, rather than repulsed and warned of danger. ”