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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.

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Most quoted on youth:

The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

Woodrow Wilson

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

W. Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage (1915)

Olympian bards who sung
Divine ideas below,
Which always find us young
And always keep us so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Poems (1847)

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hyperion (1839)

For youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears,
Than settled age his sables, and his weeds
Importing health and graveness.

William Shakespeare

Towering in confidence of twenty-one.

Samuel Johnson

The smiles, the tears
Of boyhood's years,
The words of love then spoken.

Thomas Moore

The next, keep under Sir Hobbard de Hoy:
The next, a man, no longer a boy.

Thomas Tusser

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!

William Wordsworth

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Samuel Ullman Youth (1918)

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over.

Robert Louis Stevenson Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

I pray for no more youth
perish before its prime;
That Revenge and iron-heated War
May fade with all that has gone before
Into the night of time.

Aeschylus

Her years
Were ripe, they might make six-and-twenty springs;
But there are forms which Time to touch forbears,
And turns aside his scythe to vulgar things.

Lord Byron

My salad days;
When I was green in judgment.

William Shakespeare

Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor;
Part with it as with money, sparing; pay
No moment but in purchase of its worth,
And what it's worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.

Edward Young

Youth, what man's age is like to be, doth show;
We may our ends by our beginnings know.

John Denham

Youth, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Of a young hermit, an old devil.

François Rabelais

Nothing is so hateful to the philistine as the "dreams of his youth." ... For what appeared to him in his dreams was the voice of the spirit, calling him once, as it does everyone. It is of this that youth always reminds him, eternally and ominously. That is why he is antagonistic toward youth.

Walter Benjamin Experience (1913)

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!

John Gay

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