Skip to content

Youth Quotes

Shakespeare leads, then Byron, Longfellow, Charles Sheffield and Randolph Bourne. For sourced lines, Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary (1911) defines youth as the period of possibility. Shaw’s Maxims for Revolutionists (1903) has youth forgiven everything and forgiving itself nothing, age forgiving itself everything and forgiven nothing.

The two famous complaints about the young are both flagged. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority” is credited to Socrates and marked misattributed. The notes quote a reference book of 1989 saying the quotation is spurious and mention that similar sentiments occur in Aristophanes’ The Clouds. The one credited to Hesiod, about having no hope for the future of our people, is disputed.

Random quote on Youth

Most quoted on youth:

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)

We are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species.

Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

Simone de Beauvoir The Coming of Age (1970)

At first it had been youth's ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry.

Olaf Stapledon Last and First Men (1930)

Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.

Isaac Barrow

A young ticket should never be envied, they queue for the bus the same as us.

Michael Lieber The War Hero (2018)

It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1956)

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Young men soon give and soon forget affronts;
Old age is slow in both.

Joseph Addison Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Young fellows will be young fellows.

Isaac Bickerstaffe Love in a Village (1762)

His early dreams of good outstripp'd the truth,
And troubled manhood follow'd baffled youth.

Lord Byron

In youth alone, unhappy mortals live;
But, ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive:
Discolored sickness, anxious labor, come,
And age, and death's inexorable doom.

Virgil Georgics (-29)

When a man of forty marries a girl of twenty, it isn't her youth he's seeking but his own.

Lenore Coffee Intertitle from The Dangerous Age (1923)

Hard are life's early steps; and but that youth is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, men would behold its threshold, and despair.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress—one might say, the only lever of progress.

Randolph Bourne Youth (1912)

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Our youth we can have but to-day,
We may always find time to grow old.

George Berkeley

Related topics