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Youth quotes

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“Only the dead stay 17 for ever.” Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because...” George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Young men are fitter to invent, than to judge; fitter for execution, than for counsel; and fitter for new projects, than for settled business.” Francis Bacon, The Essays of Francis Bacon

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.” Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I may die young . . . But at least I'll die smart.” John Green, Looking for Alaska

“The world must be peopled. When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.” William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“So wise so young, they say, do never live long.” William Shakespeare, Richard III

“I was a young man who attempted to make up for his ignorance with militancy.” Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I realized that I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.” Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Young men's love then lies not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“Some people turn sad awfully young . . . No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know,...” Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“If youth were not ignorant and timid, civilization would be impossible.” Honoré de Balzac, Father Goriot

“Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tales of the Jazz Age

“I know not why I love this youth, and I have heard you say love's reason's without reason.” William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.” Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“They say an old man is twice a child.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Love is too young to know what conscience is;” William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“The bright hopes of youth had to be paid for at such a bitter price of disillusionment.” W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“At your age we have faith in life; it is the privilege of youth to believe and hope, but old men see death more clearly.” Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present?” Confucius, Analects

“A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“It takes people a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.” Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.” William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

“I never knew so young a body with so old a head.” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to...” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

“That’s the trouble with you young people . . . You think because you ain’t been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forget more than you ever know. ” Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

“When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you’re laughing again.” Marilyn Monroe, My Story

“As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Or what is existence for but to be laughed at if men in their twenties have already attained the utmost?” Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“What a weary time those years were—to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.” Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

“I have heard that Glinda is a beautiful woman, who knows how to keep young in spite of the many years she has lived.” L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

“But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.” Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going...” Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World

“let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.” William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

“Flowers are so inconsistent! But I was too young to know how to love her...” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.” Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics.” George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is.” Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“ENTHUSIASM, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

“For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.” William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1

“If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.” Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“And my father! —oh, my father! evil is it with his daughter, when his grey hairs are not remembered because of the golden locks of youth!” Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

“No one who is young is ever going to be old.” John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently,...” Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

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Related topics

love age knowledge woman judgement conscience death experience life hope ignorance loneliness beauty man desire war travel timidity idealism talent

Related authors

William Shakespeare (14)
Neil Gaiman (2)
Haruki Murakami (4)
Oscar Wilde (4)
Charlotte Brontë (3)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (2)
Jane Austen (2)
Ray Bradbury (2)
W. Somerset Maugham (2)
Erich Maria Remarque (2)
Charles Bukowski (1)
Nelson Mandela (1)
Honoré de Balzac (1)
Ayn Rand (1)
Maya Angelou (1)
Victor Hugo (1)
Confucius (1)
John Green (1)
Mark Twain (1)
Marilyn Monroe (1)

Related sources

Jane Eyre (3)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (4)
Much Ado About Nothing (3)
Of Human Bondage (2)
Norwegian Wood (2)
All Quiet on the Western Front (2)
Long Walk to Freedom (1)
Hamlet (1)
Romeo and Juliet (1)
The Merchant of Venice (1)
My Story (1)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1)
Les Misérables (1)
Richard III (1)
Cymbeline (1)
East of Eden (1)
Shakespeare's Sonnets (1)
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1)
The Little Prince (1)
Dandelion Wine (1)