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Our youth began with tears and sighs,
With seeking what we could not find;
We sought and knew not what we sought;
We marvel, now we look behind:
Life's more amusing than we thought.

— Andrew Lang

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Youth

More quotes by Andrew Lang

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts—for support rather than illumination.

They hear like ocean on a western beach
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey.

Sonnet The Odyssey (1879)

But he shaved with a shell when he chose,
'Twas the manner of primitive man.

If indeed there be a god in heaven.

Andrew Lang (1879)

A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the chance in yourself.

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Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

J. M. Barrie Peter Pan (1904)

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Euripides

The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; “they will both fall into the ditch.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman (1774)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Andrew Lang (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.