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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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Education conceived as preparation for life locks the learning process within a vicious circle. Youth educated in terms of adult ideas and taught to think of learning as a process which ends when real life begins will make no better use of intelligence than the elders who prescribe the system. Brief and rebellious moments occur when youth sees this fallacy clearly, but alas, the pressure of adult civilization is too great; in the end young people fit into the pattern, succumb to the tradition of their elders—indeed, become elderly-minded before their time.

Eduard C. Lindeman The Meaning of Adult Education (1926)

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

Samuel Johnson

If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulses of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavor is to subdue our children’s spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life.

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues Reflections and Maxims (1746)

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