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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.

Random quote on Youth

Most quoted on youth:

Ah, youth! forever dear, forever kind.

Homer

Use thy youth so that thou mayest have comfort to remember it when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof. Use it as the spring-time which soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all provisions for a long and happy life.

Walter Raleigh

Although countries are hesitant to include youth in politics, young people find alternative ways to cope with marginalisation and amplify their voices. This is apparent in the youth-led protests around the world. Young people are demanding to be leaders today, rather wait their turn in an elusive future.

Cihan Dizdaroğlu

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young... and I seem to have forgotten lately.

J. K. Rowling

I was between
A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy,
A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.

Richard Harris Barham

Youth holds no society with grief.

Euripides

In its sublime audacity of faith,
"Be thou removed!" it to the mountain saith,
And with ambitious feet, secure and proud,
Ascends the ladder leaning on the cloud!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.

Charles Kingsley The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863)

Even if teen-age children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they're gone. They put a boiling in the air around them. As they left, the whole house seemed to sigh and settle. No wonder poltergeists infest only houses with adolescent children.

John Steinbeck The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Cicero

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams
With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see,
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.

William Shakespeare

We must encourage our youth, listen to them and help them to resolve youth issues. After all, they are our future.

Dawn Butler

Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise,
We love the play-place of our early days;
The scene is touching, and the heart is stone,
That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.

William Cowper

Over the trackless past, somewhere,
Lie the lost days of our tropic youth,
Only regained by faith and prayer,
Only recalled by prayer and plaint,
Each lost day has its patron saint!

Bret Harte

Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes! they turn,
Like marigolds, toward the sunny side.

Jean Ingelow

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A. E. Housman A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.

Randolph Bourne Youth (1912)

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