Youthfulness

“ 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 ”

“ 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 frolicksomeness of their years. ”

“ That, therefore, which young men—not only uninstructed, but absolutely ignorant—treat as of no account, shall men who are neither young nor ignorant shrink from in terror? As a general truth, as it seems to me, it is weariness of all pursuits that creates weariness of life. There are certain pursuits adapted to childhood: do young men miss them? There are others suited to early manhood: does that settled time of life called "middle age" ask for them? There are others, again, suited to that age, but not looked for in old age. ”

“ Without youth there is no vitality; without vitality, no action; without action, no success. I often fancied what results might arise if to the mature thoughts and experience of age were to be added the fire, the energy, and the passion of youth. If caution and rashness, reserve and intrepidity, the distrust that comes of knowing men, with that credulous hope that stirs the young heart, were all to centre in one nature, what might we not effect? ”

“ O Time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing! His youth 'gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing: Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen; Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green. ”

“ 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 it was not so much mere picture of youth and age ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically divining it. ”

“ Age envies Youth for its innocence, its vigour and its strength; for its well-nigh unshakable belief in itself, in the reality of happiness and of love: but Age envies it so little—the mere fact of being young. It knows what lies ahead of Youth, and, in that knowledge, there can be no room for envy. ”

“ Nor all the dignity of age and power and pomp can follow there;
They've kept the magic charm of youth beneath the wrinkled robe of Time,
And there's no friendly apple tree that they have grown too old to climb.
They have not let their boyhood die; they can be children for the day;
They have not bartered for success and all its praise, the gift of play. ”

“ But the poet who gathered this circle of young people about him, holding them by the charm of his personality, who said that the way to keep young was to be with the young, who delighted in youth even to the last, giving evidence in himself that age is but the youth of immortality, was yet to youth, as he was to maturity, a leader—his judgment, not theirs, dominated. ”

“ From youth's serene and sunny morn To manhood's stern meridian prime. From manhood, till the weight of years, And life's dull constant toil, and tears, And passion's ever raging storm, Have dimmed the eye and bowed the form. True, youth, of hope and love possessed, By friends—youth has no foes—caressed, Finds in the present—happy boy!— Enough of gaiety and joy ”

“ Are not you the men, and is not this the season, for the handling of such a topic?
Are not you the men? Who among you has not felt, at one time or another, the spark of a divine fire kindling within you? Who has not yearned with an intense, if momentary, yearning to do something worthy, to be something worthy? Youth is the hey-day of hope, of enthusiasm, of lofty aspiration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Youth fleets away, if not happily, at least tranquilly, while thus employed; and maturity glides into age, and age drops into the grave, scarcely conscious of the gradations of each, owing to the mind having been filled with a continuous train of thought, engendered by study. ”

“ CHAPTER III. EDUCATION OF JACOB. "Who does not love to recall the occurrences of youth, however sad? I cannot boast of happiness in my childhood, yet the memory of those days brings tears to my eyes, and I repeat that which is written in one of our books: 'Youth is a garland of flowers; old age, a crown of thorns.' Even in comparison with maturity, full of power and intelligence, those years seem to me strewn with flowers, although they were unhappy. ”

“ The freshness and enthusiasm of youth cheers the dreariness of age; and age can return the benefit a hundred fold, by its mild maxims of experience and wisdom. In this country, youth and age are too much separated; the young flock together, and leave the old to themselves. We seem to act upon the principle that there cannot be sympathy between these two extremes of life ”

“ Besides, youth when it has been town-bred, and if it have not the instinctive passion for nature, does not, in the order of things—in the fantastic extravagance of its emotions and the lethargy of its weariness—have recourse to the last earthly refuge of well-balanced, wise old age. ”

“ Partly doubtless as the effect of a life, now getting to be a tolerably long one, spent in the older world, I see the world of our childhood as very young indeed, young with its own juvenility as well as with ours ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It seems to me that our great problem, or rather our chief concern, should not be so much how to stay young in the sense of possessing all the attributes of youth, for the passing of the years does bring changes, but how to pass gracefully, and even magnificently, [Pg 41] and with undiminished vigour from youth to middle age, and then how to carry that middle age into approaching old age, with a great deal more of the vigour and the outlook of middle life than we ordinarily do. ”

“ The reason they thought to be that the interests of age have contracted to about the same scope as those of childhood before it has expanded into maturity. The skein of life is drawn together to a point at the two ends and spread out in the middle. ”

“ 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! ”

“ They join the others, and walk in my garden, to remind me of the times we have laughed together, and to assure me that life in the future still has good things for me.
For, make no mistake, youth is very wonderful, youth is very beautiful, but it passes and leaves behind, if you will only try to cultivate it, something which can never pass away: that is the youth that is not a question of years, but of humanity and a young heart. ”

“ It was in this mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul—a childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all, in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth. ”

“ Youth, first youth, was gone, with its illusions and its dreams. But before them lay the years of fulfilment, years of understanding. Youth demanded everything, and was discontented that it secured less than its demands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From that time onwards, as this book testifies, he has been growing younger in precisely those characteristics. There is a good deal to be thought, if not said, on this subject. Children are, I conceive, rather symbols of youth than youth itself; they are unconsciously young. Age, on the other hand, has the power of converting the [120] symbol into the reality, and of being young and knowing it. Unless ye become, not little children, but as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven. ”

“ If it faithfully depict the psychology of child life, of adolescence, of dawning maturity, devoid though it be of plot and, as a whole, of dramatic interest, it may yet, as a typical human portrait, justify itself; may aid the young to a better understanding of their own natures, and help those no longer young to a keener remembrance, a deeper sympathy, and a broader tolerance concerning the struggles, problems, and complexities that beset the young lives around them. ”

“ It is indeed scarcely possible to over-estimate the importance of training the young to virtuous habits. In them they are the easiest formed, and when formed they last for life; like letters cut on the bark of a tree they grow and widen with age. ”

“ Youth is the smile of the future in the presence of an unknown quantity, which is itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ For youth clings more tenaciously to life than older people do, for to them it is an untried and shining pathway, flowered with hope, anticipation, and the luring glimmer of unfulfilled aims and ambitions. ”

“ Youth is sweet, with its fiery enterprise, and I suppose mature manhood will be just as much so, though in a calmer way, and age, quieter still, will have its own merits,–the thing is only to do with life what we ought, and what is suited to each of its stages ”

“ Young without youth, old without maturity, young in form, old in heart and brain, they stand before us, keen, sharp, and confident; strong in a knowledge of facts, dates, and tables—a knowledge unleavened by the touches of imagination, unsoftened by modesty, unmoved by the freshness and simplicity which give such beauty to youth, and which sometimes make even the wisdom of manhood bow to its intuitions, confessing with the German philosopher, that “the fresh gaze of the child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable seer.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How good it was to be young! No wonder men had so desperately sought the secret of Eternal Youth! Who would not be young for ever, for such dreams and such an appetite?
Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such fantastic nonsense. ”

“ It was, however, the first time I had seen with my own eyes this desperate yearning of age for youth, or this something that is almost a death-blow which youth can inflict on age. My father used to say that fundamentally there is no such period as age, that only the outer husk grows old, while the inner self, the vital ego, is young eternally. ”

“ 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! ”