For Youth Quotes & Sayings

Too many people are frightened. They want youth to last. They complain bitterly if sickness comes. But the world is always in tumult, and fortunes rise and fall and fail. It is the ambitious who accomplish things. It takes courage to be ambitious, for never was anything great achieved without risk. — Jeff Wheeler

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality. — Milan Kundera

A great Tamil poet, given to decadence and debauchery, once said that the story of his life could serve as an example to the youth on how one should
not live. Having lived, or rather, having sleepwalked for ten years through the desolate wastelands of depression, I survived to reach the other side. I believe that this validates my claim to write this book for you. — Indu Muralidharan

As children become increasingly less connected to adults, they rely more and more on each other; the whole natural order of things change. In the natural order of all mammalian cultures, animals or humans, the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modelling, cue giving or mentoring. They are not equipped to give one another a sense of direction or values. As a result of today's shift to this peer orientation, we are seeing the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence and precocious sexualization of North American Youth. The disruption of family life, rapid economic and social changes to human culture and relationships, and the erosion of stable communities are at the core of this shift. — Gabor Mate

If yet your blood does not rage, then it is water that flows in your veins. For what is the flush of youth, if it is not of service to the motherland. — Chandra Shekhar Azad

For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden. I — Plato

For a large majority of youth raised in church, the church has become irrelevant to their goals and pursuits in life — Sunday Adelaja

It is from the bystanders (who are in the vast majority) that we receive the propaganda that life is not worth living, that life is drudgery, that the ambitions of youth must he laid aside for a life which is but a painful wait for death. These are the ones who squeeze what excitement they can from life out of the imaginations and experiences of others through books and movies. These are the insignificant and forgotten men who preach conformity because it is all they know. These are the men who dream at night of what could have been, but who wake at dawn to take their places at the now-familiar rut and to merely exist through another day. For them, the romance of life is long dead and they are forced to go through the years on a treadmill, cursing their existence, yet afraid to die because of the unknown which faces them after death. They lacked the only true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences. — Hunter S. Thompson

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading. — Italo Calvino

Indeed, I am sometimes inclined to doubt whether some men consider youth as rational and intelligent beings, with minds capable of expansion, and talents formed for usefulness. — Joseph Lancaster

HAN: 'Tis said that sometimes those who knew us in
Our youth did know us best. From them we have
No secrets and cannot pretend to be
Another thing that what we are. They keep
Our living honest, for they know who we
Have been. — Ian Doescher

Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. — David Foster Wallace

Youth is the time for dreams, boy...The trick is, when you get older, not to forget them.

- Captain John Winters — James Ramsey Ullman

Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive. — Anthony Burgess

He asked her, 'Why do you feel sorry for me, Old Woman?'
The Old Woman stood beside him and looked out the window at the Garden, so beautiful, flowering and everywhere illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and said, 'I feel sorry for you, dear Youth, because I know where you are gazing and what you are waiting for. I feel sorry for you and your mother.'
Perhaps because of these words, or perhaps because of something else, there was a change in the Youth's mood. The Garden, flowering behind the high fence below his window, and exuding a wonderful fragrance, suddenly seemed somehow strange to him; and an ominous sensation, a sudden fear, gripped his heart with a violent palpitation, like heady and languid fragrances rising from brilliant flowers.
'What is happening?' he wondered in confusion.
("The Poison Garden") — Valery Bryusov

In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young, the nice ones with automobiles, the dull ones full of suspicions and stinginess. By asking a thousand questions of many heavy souls, I did not learn much. You receive biographies interesting mainly for their coherence. So many are children who from the day of their birth are growing up to be their parents. Look at the voting records, inherited like flat feet. — Elizabeth Hardwick

To be a living sacrifice will involve all my time. God wants me to live every minute for Him in accordance with His will and purpose, sixty minutes of every hour, twenty-four hours of every day, being available to Him. No time can be considered as my own, or as "off-duty" or "free." I cannot barter with God about how much time I can give to serve Him. Whatever I am doing, be it a routine salaried job, or housework at home, be it holiday time and free, or after-work Christian youth activities, all should be undertaken for Him, to reveal His indwelling presence to those around me. The example of my life must be as telling as my preaching if He is to be honored. — Helen Roseveare

And therefore, I said, Glaucon, musical training is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he is able to know the reason why; and when reason comes he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar ...
... Thus much of music, which makes a fair ending; for what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty? — Plato

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled. — Charles Mackay

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age. — James Thurber

There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could re-create the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume
Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom-flower? — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Organize first for knowledge, first with the object of making us know ourselves as a nation, for we have to do that before we canbe of value to other nations of the world and then organize to accomplish the things that you decide to want. Anddon't make decisions with the interest of youth alone before you. Make your decisions because they are good for the nation as a whole. — Eleanor Roosevelt

In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple ... Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time ... I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn't want it distorted like that. And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion. — Richard P. Feynman

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. — Wendell Berry

Dream young. Don't settle for old - for to be old is to be superstitious and without curiosity and always questioning your faith. And be ferocious in your dreaming - run like a sun's explosion, and skip across bluing waves, and dance upon tips of swan feathers. — Carew Papritz

In Greenville, we were blessed to have lots of youth arts programs. I changed middle schools to go to an arts middle school. Then, when high school came, I went to normal high school for a little while before auditioning for the Governor's School for Arts and Humanities. — Danielle Brooks

For all his youth, he seemed to be willing himself to the edge of an adult despair. — J.G. Ballard

Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every wound. — Ambrose Bierce

It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on. — Mark Twain

The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark power of reality. The gods enjoy eternal youth, and the search for the means of securing it was one of the occupations of the heroes of mythology and the sages, as it was of real adventurers in the middle ages and more recent times ... But the fountain of youth has not been found, and can not be found if it is sought in any particular spot on the earth. Yet it is no fable, no dream-picture; it requires no adept to find it: it streams forth inexhaustible in all living nature. — Ferdinand Cohn

We're constantly told that running will ruin our knees and outrage our hearts, but for nearly all of human existence, it was associated with freedom, vitality, and eternal youth. — Christopher McDougall

There was no fear of sandpaper earth, no sense of danger from a bare-skinned spill, for the boy was a child - a six-foot, one-inch growing child who knew nothing of accident, injury, dismemberment, death - who would study those lessons tomorrow, thank you, but not today. Today, it would be sufficient to be wild and free. — Tony Taylor

Comes again the longing, the desire that has no name. Is it for Mrs. Prouty, for a drink, for both: for a party, for youth, for the good times, for dear good drinking and fighting comrades, for football-game girls in the fall with faces like flowers? Comes the longing and it has to do with being fifteen and fifty and with the winter sun striking down into a brick-yard and on clapboard walls rounded off with old hard blistered paint and across a doorsill onto linoleum. Desire has a smell: of cold linoleum and gas heat and the sour piebald bark of crepe myrtle. A good-humored thirty-five-year-old lady takes the air in a back lot in a small town. — Walker Percy

Death is fortunate for the child, bitter to the youth, too late to the old. — Publilius Syrus

I have devoted my whole life to Physical Culture. I shall devote the rest too for the same. I have seen the degradation in which we are at present. I have travelled extensively and all that I have remarked here is from experience; and my suggestions are to meet the situation. I know they would, if adapted remedy the evil; for, I have studied carefully the position. If we in all seriousness wish to call ourselves the descendants of the mighty Yoddhas of past, if we wish not to cast a blot on the fair name of India, if we wish that India should have a future vying with its glorious past, if we wish that we should gain an honorable and equal place among the peoples of the world it should be our sacred resolve from now to wake up from the sleep as a lion; we should muster muscle and steel the body. For all greatness lies in Culture and 1 should only be too gratified if my scheme could put the youth of the country on the right track to achieve our most cherished Ideals. — Kodi Ramamurthy Naidu

Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our last epoch - that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I used to do a lot of serious theatre during my school and college days. Comedy was only reserved for youth festival and inter-college competitions. Then once 'The Great Indian Laughter Challenge' was launched, a regional channel in Punjab started a program based on that. I participated in it and emerged as the winner. — Kapil Sharma

There are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of Al-Qaeda without the terrorism. — Maajid Nawaz

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most of the time, if you're not really paying attention, you're someplace else. So your child might say, "Daddy, I want this," and you might say, "Just a minute, I'm busy." Now that's no big deal-we all get busy, and kids frequently ask for attention. But over your child's entire youth, you may have an enormous number of such moments to be really, fully present, but because you thought you were busy, you didn't see the opportunities these moments presented ... People carry around an enormous amount of grief because they missed the little things. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. — Daniel Amory

From lips indifferent of her death I heard,
Indifferently I listened to it, too,'
were echoing in my heart. O youth, youth! little dost thou care for anything; thou art master, as it were, of all the treasures of the universe - even sorrow gives thee pleasure, even grief thou canst turn to thy profit; thou art self-confident and insolent; thou sayest, 'I alone am living - look you!' - but thy days fly by all the while, and vanish without trace or reckoning; and everything in thee vanishes, like wax in the sun, like snow ... . And, perhaps, the whole secret of thy charm lies, not in being able to do anything, but in being able to think thou wilt do anything; lies just in thy throwing to the winds, forces which thou couldst not make other use of; in each of us gravely regarding himself as a prodigal, gravely supposing that he is justified in saying, 'Oh, what might I not have done if I had not wasted my time! — Ivan Turgenev

The only way that I have seen to keep teenagers out of one another's arms is to give them a bigger, more wonderful goal to offset all the distractions common to their youth. For a young man, that goal should include preparing for a delightful and profitable career, doing something he really enjoys doing. For a young woman, it includes preparing to be the ideal wife, mother and administrative assistant such a passionate and goal-oriented young man will need — Gregg Harris

Time goes too quickly. This is the advice that my mother should have given me from her hospital bed. Instead of vague, unknowable quips like "Be careful what you wish for," she should have told me time slides away on a hillside of loose shale and takes everything in its path - dreams, opportunities, hopes. And youth. It takes that fastest of all. — Kristin Hannah

The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live
undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are
my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks
we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. — Oscar Wilde

I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since. — Richard K. Morgan

The band and I were leading at a Youth Specialties convention. We were asked to back up Matt Maher for one of the sessions. Matt handed us the chord charts and, with less than 5 minutes of practice, we were playing it live. I fell in love with this song immediately. You can't hear the message of God's sufficient grace too many times. Matt is a great lead worshiper and is a part of Life Teen, a growing worship movement in the Catholic Church. — Chris Tomlin

For centuries explorers, scientists and religious followers have sought a way to make the hooded figure of death fail in his quest. And none have persevered. But they didn't know what I know. They sought fountains of youth and treasures and other sacrificial regimens that would secure their immortality. But it's not about the blood that runs through our veins. It's about the approach. Death can't be thwarted with a miracle cure. It has to be outmaneuvered. — Sarah Noffke

A fondness for martyrdom, especially of the verbal variety, is common to the young. — Barbara Mertz

In my youth I thought of writing a satire on mankind! but now in my age I think I should write an apology for them. — Horace

I have lived long enough to see real, significant changes made for the good...and I have been fortunate enough to have participated in some of them...One person can make a difference!
(Father Ted Hesburgh, C.S.C., quoted in our book, God's Icebreaker by Jill A. Boughton and Julie Walters) — Jill A. Boughton

Out of the city and over the hill,
Into the spaces where Time stands still,
Under the tall trees, touching old wood,
Taking the way where warriors once stood;
Crossing the little bridge, losing my way,
But finding a friendly place where I can stay.
Those were the days, friend, when we were strong
And strode down the road to an old marching song
When the dew on the grass was fresh every morn,
And we woke to the call of the ring-dove at dawn.
The years have gone by, and sometimes I falter,
But still I set out for a stroll or a saunter,
For the wind is as fresh as it was in my youth,
And the peach and the pear, still the sweetest of fruit,
So cast away care and come roaming with me,
Where the grass is still green and the air is still free. — Ruskin Bond

I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea. — William Cobbett

Youth is not an excuse for insanity. — Chris Colfer

With Bruford, the album was One Of A Kind. All-instrumental, it possessed the kind of focused vision that allowed for no ifs or buts. With the unnerving confidence of youth, it had This Is What We Do And This Is How We Do It stamped all over it. — Bill Bruford

Twenty-eight years is a long time to think about why I loved you, and it's not for the reasons I first assumed: because you swam in the space below my heart; or because you stanched the youth I was bleeding out daily; or because one day you might take care of me when I couldn't take care of myself. [. . .] I loved you, Bethany, because you were the one relationship I never had to earn. You arrived in this world loving me more, even when I did not deserve it. — Jodi Picoult

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receeding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you. — R.S. Thomas

I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast, without remembering any more sounds than I already know now. The only one who remembers any of my sounds is me. How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people? How do you jump off one moving train, marked Yourself, and jump onto a train moving in the opposite direction, marked Everybody Else? I loved a Modern Lovers song called, 'Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste,' and I didn't want to waste mine. — Rob Sheffield

We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful. — Alexander McCall Smith

Thus it is our daughters leave us,
Those we love, and those who love us!
Just when they have learned to help us,
When we are old and lean upon them,
Comes a youth with flaunting feathers,
With his flute of reeds, a stranger
Wanders piping through the village,
Beckons to the fairest maiden,
And she follows where he leads her,
Leaving all things for the stranger! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring — Sue Perkins

... growing pale and sober with the thought that her fate was soon to be decided; for, like all young people, she was sure that her whole life could be settled by one human creature, quite forgetting how wonderfully Providence trains us by disappointment, surprises us with unexpected success, and turns our seeming trials into blessing. — Louisa May Alcott

Because of my intense hopes for the youth of China, I feel very keenly my responsibility for their future success or failure. The fate of China lies in their hands. The responsibility for organizing and training them to become worthy citizens of China, able to undertake the tasks of Resistance and Reconstruction, is mine; I cannot evade it. — Chiang Kai-shek

You're my hero, Rhage."
Ears pricked up, Rhage watched her closely. Anything she said was important to him, and how lovely was that?
"I always thought I'd grow up and find my own hero." Rainie grimaced at herself in the mirror. Obviously she shouldn't have wasted her youth on reading and daydreaming. "But I gave up; I'm not holding out for a hero anymore. — Cherise Sinclair

The good thing, really, is that electronic music started as a fringe subculture, and now it's the biggest youth culture in the world. People pretty much everywhere go crazy for electronic music. — Paul Van Dyk

For youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed. — William Shakespeare

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz. — Robert Wyatt

That the crowning miracle of all the miracles summed up in the New Testament, after the miracle of the blind seeing, and the lame walking, and the restoration of the dead to life, was the miracle that the poor had the Gospel preached to them. That while the poor were unnaturally and unnecessarily cut off by the thousand, in the prematurity of their age, or in the rottenness of their youth - for of flower or blossom such youth has none - the Gospel was NOT preached to them, saving in hollow and unmeaning voices. That of all wrongs, this was the first mighty wrong the Pestilence warned us to set right. And that no Post- Office Order to any amount, given to a Begging-Letter Writer for the quieting of an uneasy breast, would be presentable on the Last Great Day as anything towards it. — Charles Dickens

The intermingling in the school of youth of different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment. Common subject matter accustoms all to a unity of outlook upon a broader horizon than is visible to the members of any group while it is isolated. The assimilative force of the American public school is eloquent testimony to the efficacy of the common and balanced appeal. — John Dewey

Youth is the season of receptivity, and should be devoted to acquirement; and manhood of power
that demands an earnest application. Old age is for revision. — Christian Nestell Bovee

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. — Ian Caldwell

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. — Henry James

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Do you know that when one who has influence with youth- be he teacher, leader or parent- seriously weakens the foundations upon which a young person has built, by faith-destroying challenges the youngster is not yet equipped to meet, he fashions a disciple who has been effectively cut loose from fundamentals at a time when he needs most to rely on them? The challenger may himself be a moral, educated, well-meaning person of integrity, doing what he does in the name of honesty and truth. His own character may have been formed in an atmosphere of faith and conviction which, through his influence, he may now help to destroy in his young follower. "Disenchanted" himself in his mature years, he turns his powers on an immature mind and leaves it ready prey for nostrums and superstitions and behavior he himself would disdain. — Marion D. Hanks

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except ... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything. — Floyd Dell

Nowadays, influencers do anything to keep up with each other for attention, and it's not always something today's youth should mimic. — Melanie Iglesias

Obviously, Jay-Z is one of the greatest entertainers of the world today. Not only is he a remarkable rhetorical genius, he's also a man of deep sympathy and empathy for those who are lost and vulnerable, but especially under-educated youth of all cultures and stripes. — Michael Eric Dyson

The foundation of youth [for me] ... lots of water, lots of laughter, lots of sex. — Cameron Diaz

Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile. — Oscar Wilde

Youth leaders, are you holding aloft our standards, or have you compromised them for the lowest common denominator in order to appease the deceived or vile within the Church? Are the dances and music in your cultural halls virtuous, lovely, praiseworthy, and of good report (Articles of Faith 13), or do they represent a modern Sodom with short skirts, loud beat, strobe lights, and darkness? — Ezra Taft Benson

In high school, I was on the youth advisory council for the Mayor's Office of Los Angeles, and that was kind of my first experience in the bureaucratic system. We tried to get things done, and nobody was really interested in getting anything done. — Rashida Jones

Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Age isn't triggered by wrinkles,nor by the reduction of strong footing,for the true youth exists effectively in your heart,brightens through your smile and beats slow when your heart is right, innocent like that of a child — Nwilliams S C

We must cherish our inheritance. We must preserve our nationality for the youth of our future. The story should be written down to pass on. — Louis Riel

My friendship with Jack remains strained. I want to believe that he was duped, but he has always been far too clever to fall for another man's ruse. So we have added yet one more thing to our relationship about which we never speak. Sometimes I think we will break beneath the weight of it, but on those occasions I have but to look at my wife in order to find the strength to carry on. I am determined to be worthy of her and that requires that I be a far stronger and better man than I had ever planned to be.
We see Frannie from time to time, not as often as we'd like unfortunately. She did eventually marry, but that is her story to tell.
Dear Frannie, darling Frannie.
She shall always remain the love of my youth, the one for whom I sold my soul to the devil. But Catherine, my beloved Catherine, shall always be the center of my heart, the one who, in the final hour, would not let the devil have me. — Lorraine Heath

God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people's sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with the love of God and everyman ... But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections ... Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to youth and say, Renounce! ... And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! — Knut Hamsun

At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the big one. That was presented to me by the Reich Youth Leader himself, Baldur von Schirach. Let me show you my scrapbook. — William Styron

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. — E. M. Forster

Oh roses for the flush of youth, And laurel for the perfect prime; But pluck an ivy branch for me Grown old before my time. — Christina Rossetti

For the fact was drugs were not necessary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn't care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone. — Andrew Holleran

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head
in my memory, in my thoughts
was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes, shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said. — Claire Messud

Let us be quite clear that the ideal is a paradox. Most of us, having grown up among the ruins of the chivalrous tradition, were taught in our youth that a bully is always a coward. Our first week at school refuted this lie, along with its corollary that a truly brave man is always gentle. It is a pernicious lie because it misses the real novelty and originality of the medieval demand upon human nature. Worse still, it represents as a natural fact something which is really a human ideal, nowhere fully attained, and nowhere attained at all without arduous discipline. It is refuted by history and Experience. Homer's Achilles knows nothing of the demand that the brave should also be the modest and the merciful. He kills men as they cry for quarter or takes them prisoner to kill them at leisure. — C.S. Lewis

Those who would live beyond their nature-given span lose their framework, and with it lose a proper sense of relationship to those who are younger, gaining only the resentment of youth for encroaching on its careers and resources. The fact that there is a limited right time to do the rewarding things in our lives is what creates the urgency to do them. Otherwise, we might stagnate in procrastination. The very fact that at our backs, as the poet cautions his coy mistress, we "always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near" enhances the world and makes the time priceless. — Sherwin B. Nuland

Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.' "The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,' said she. "'Oh!' said my brother, 'I saw you weep once over an eagle you shot.' "'That was because it was so like you, brother,' I replied; 'but indeed, this youth may have better cause for tears than that - I was wrong.' "'Wait — George MacDonald

Literature - Eastern and Western - abounds with stories, myths, legends about the search for youth, for eternal life. — F. Sionil Jose

There were some that shook their heads and thought this was too much of a good thing; it seemed unfair that anyone should possess (apparently) perpetual youth as well as (reputedly) inexhaustible wealth. 'It will have to be paid for,' they said. 'It isn't natural, and trouble will come of it! — J.R.R. Tolkien

Ah man. I remember the days of lying to my mother about a boy. Once I had a boy hidden in the closet and of course Mom wouldn't leave, so I finally had to pretend to get sick to my stomach just to get her out of the room long enough for him to climb out the window and down the tree. He fell, broke his leg. Ah, to be young again. — Amy Sherman-Palladino

Ralph really felt sorry for the boy, hampered as he was by his youth and his mother. — Beverly Cleary

All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well. — Alfred The Great

Most good roles are written for young men. We are fixated on youth. So however much people say there is nothing wrong with being bald, the reality is once the hair is gone, you might not get the parts. — Ian Hart