Youth

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Popular use of the word Youth refers to a person who is neither an adult nor a child, but somewhere in between, scientifically referred to as an adolescent and, in most English speaking countries, commonly referred to as a teen or teenager. It is used to identify a particular mindset of attitude, as in "He is very youthful". In various social, political, cultural, and legal contexts, the word "youth" refers to a pre-determined set of experiences, ideals, and perspectives.

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  • Young men soon give and soon forget affronts;
    Old age is slow in both.
  • Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.
  • 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.
  • Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
    There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
    But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
    These laid the world away: poured out the red
    Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
    Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
    That men call age, and those who would have been
    Their sons, they gave their immortality.
  • Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.
  • 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.
  • Prima commendiato proficiscitur a modestia tum pietate in parentes, tum in suos benevolentia.
    • The chief recommendation [in a young man] is modesty, then dutiful conduct toward parents, then affection for kindred.
    • Cicero, De Officiis (44 B.C.), II. 13.
  • Jugend ist Trunkenheit ohne Wein.
    • Youth is intoxication without wine.
    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Diwan - Saki Nameh: Book of the Cupbearer, 1819-1827.
  • Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always.
  • "Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...]."
  • 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.
  • The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
    If she unmask her beauty to the moon;
    Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes.
    The canker galls the infants of the spring,
    Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
    And in the morn and liquid dew of youth,
    Contagious blastments are most imminent.
    • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act I, scene 3, line 36. "Infants of the spring" found also in Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, scene 1, line 100.
  • 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.
  • Is in the very May-morn of his youth,
    Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises.
  • The pleasure and sadness of youth is that the speed of its passing is never thought about; and so you say that you will do this or that in a year, in five years, only to wake up one morning to realize that what you thought was infinitely prolonged has ended.
    • Derek Tangye, British author. From his autobiography, The Way to Minak (1968), Ch XV, p. 157.
  • For the more paart, youthe is rebel,
    Un-to reson & hatith her doctryne.
    • As for the moré part Youth is rebél
      Unto Reasón, and hateth her doctrine.
    • Thomas Occleve, from Frederick Furnivall and Israel Gollancz's three-volume edition of Hoccleve's Works (Early English Text Society, 1892-1925), Line 65, vol. 1, p. 27; modern spelling from Henry Morley (ed.) Shorter English Poems (London: Cassell, 1883), p. 58.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 921-24.
  • Youth dreams a bliss on this side death.
    It dreams a rest, if not more deep,
    More grateful than this marble sleep;
    It hears a voice within it tell:
    Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well.
    'Tis all perhaps which man acquires,
    But 'tis not what our youth desires.
  • Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business.
  • I was between
    A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy,
    A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen.
  • Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.
    • Isaac Barrow, Duty of Thanksgiving, Works, Volume I, p. 66.
  • Our youth we can have but to-day;
    We may always find time to grow old.
  • Young fellows will be young fellows.
  • And both were young, and one was beautiful.
  • Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
  • 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, Cato; or, An Essay on Old Age.
  • Teneris, heu, lubrica moribus ætas!
    • Alas! the slippery nature of tender youth.
    • Claudianus, 'De Raptu Proserpinæ, III. 227.
  • Life went a-Maying
    With Nature, Hope, and Poesy;
    * When I was young!
    When I was young?—Ah, woful when!
  • A young Apollo, golden haired,
    Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
    Magnificently unprepared
    For the long littleness of life.
    • Mrs. Cornford, On Rupert Brooke (1915).
  • 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.
  • Youth, what man's age is like to be, doth show;
    We may our ends by our beginnings know.
  • Youth should watch joys and shoot them as they fly.
  • Olympian bards who sung
    Divine ideas below,
    Which always find us young,
    And always keep us so.
  • Angelicus juvenis senibus satanizat in annis.
    • An angelic boyhood becomes a Satanic old age.
    • Erasmus, Fam. Coll. Quoted as a proverb invented by Satan.
  • Si jeunesse savoit, si vieillesse pouvoit.
    • Henri Étienne, Les Premices. "Si jeune savoit, et vieux pouvoit, / Jamais disette n'y auroit. If youth but knew, and age were able, / Then poverty would be a fable." Proverb of the Twelfth Century.
  • Youth holds no society with grief.
  • 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!
  • Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows,
    While proudly rising o'er the azure realm
    In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
    Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm.
  • The insect-youth are on the wing,
    Eager to taste the honied spring,
    And float amid the liquid noon!
  • 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!
  • There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals.
  • Ah, youth! forever dear, forever kind.
    • Homer, The Iliad, Book XIX, line 303. Pope's translation.
  • Youth! youth! how buoyant are thy hopes! they turn,
    Like marigolds, toward the sunny side.
  • All the world's a mass of folly,
    Youth is gay, age melancholy:
    Youth is spending, age is thrifty,
    Mad at twenty, cold at fifty;
    Man is nought but folly's slave,
    From the cradle to the grave.
    • William Henry Ireland, Modern Ship of Fools (Of the Folly of all the World).
  • Towering in confidence of twenty-one.
  • 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.
  • Our youth began with tears and sighs,
    With seeking what we could not find;
    We sought and knew not what we sought;
    We marvel, now we look behind:
    Life's more amusing than we thought.
  • Flos juvenum (Flos juventutis).
    • The flower of the young men (the flower of youth).
    • Livy, VIII. 8; XXXVII. 12.
  • Standing with reluctant feet,
    Where the brook and river meet,
    Womanhood and childhood fleet!
  • 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!
  • 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!
  • Youth, that pursuest with such eager pace
    Thy even way,
    Thou pantest on to win a mournful race:
    Then stay! oh, stay!
    Pause and luxuriate in thy sunny plain;
    Loiter,—enjoy:
    Once past, Thou never wilt come back again,
    A second Boy.
  • 'Tis now the summer of your youth: time has not cropped the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.
  • The smiles, the tears
    Of boyhood's years,
    The words of love then spoken.
  • Dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer.
    • How different from the present man was the youth of earlier days!
    • Ovid, Heroides, IX. 24.
  • The atrocious crime of being a young man.
    • William Pitt to Walpole. Boswell's Life of Johnson (March 6, 1741).
  • When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one.
  • De jeune hermite, vieil diable.
    • Of a young hermit, an old devil.
    • François Rabelais, Pantagruel. Quoted, as a "proverbe authentique".
  • Crabbed age and youth cannot live together;
    Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care;
    Youth like summer morn, age like winter weather;
    Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.
    Youth is full of sport, age's breath is short;
    Youth is nimble, age is lame;
    Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold;
    Youth is wild, and age is tame.
    Age, I do abhor thee; youth I do adore thee.
  • 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.
  • Hail, blooming Youth!
    May all your virtues with your years improve,
    Till in consummate worth you shine the pride
    Of these our days, and succeeding times
    A bright example.
  • 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.
  • For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
  • What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
    Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy's?
  • What unjust judges fathers are, when in regard to us they hold
    That even in our boyish days we ought in conduct to be old,
    Nor taste at all the very things that youth and only youth requires;
    They rule us by their present wants not by their past long-lost desires.
    • Terence, The Self-Tormentor, Act I, scene 3. F. W. Ricord's translation.
  • The next, keep under Sir Hobbard de Hoy:
    The next, a man, no longer a boy.
  • Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very Heaven!
  • 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, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night II, line 47.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

  • The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable.
  • 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.
  • Every stage of life has its own set of manners, that is suited to it, and best becomes it. Each is beautiful in its season; and you might as well quarrel with the child's rattle, and advance him directly to the boy's top and span-farthing, as expect from diffident youth the manly confidence of riper age.
    • Bishop Hurd, p. 624.
  • A youth thoughtless! when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! when all the happiness of his home forever depends on the chances or the passions of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when his every act is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than now — though indeed there is only one place where a man may be nobly thoughtless — his death-bed. No thinking should be ever left to be done there.
  • Oh thou corrupter of youth! I would not take thy death, for all the pleasures of thy guilty life, a thousand fold. Thou shalt draw near to the shadow of death. To the Christian these shades are the golden haze which heaven's light makes, when it meets the earth and mingles with its shadows. But to thee, these shall be shadows full of phantom-shapes. Images of terror in the Future shall dimly rise and beckon: — the ghastly deeds of the Past shall stretch out their skinny hands to push thee forward! Thou shalt not die unattended! Despair shall mock thee. Agony shall tender to thy parched lips her fiery cup. Remorse shall feel for thy heart and rend it open. Good men shall breathe freer at thy death, and utter thanksgiving when thou art gone.
  • When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
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Last modified on 15 August 2012, at 12:43