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O happy unown'd youths! your limbs can bear
The scorching dog-star and the winter's air,
While the rich infant, nurs'd with care and pain,
Thirsts with each heat and coughs with every rain!

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Youth

More quotes by John Gay

Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; and now I know it.

While there is life there's hope, he cried.

Fables (1727)

I must have women—there is nothing unbends the mind like them.

The Beggar's Opera (1728)

The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets.

The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Brother, brother! we are both in the wrong.

The Beggar's Opera (1728)

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