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It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due.

— W. Somerset Maugham

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Youth

More quotes by W. Somerset Maugham

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The Summing Up (1938)

But when all was said the important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

All W. Somerset Maugham quotes →

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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.

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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.

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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: W. Somerset Maugham (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.