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The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they allow disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children now are tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
This quote was used by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Gijsbert van Hall, following a street demonstration in 1966, as reported by The New York Times, April 3, 1966, p. 16
-Anon., widely mis-attributed to Socrates
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Youth lives on hope, old age on memories.
-Proverb
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If youth but had the knowledge and old age the strength.
-Proverb
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All lovely things will have an ending, All lovely things will fade and die; And youth, that's now so bravely spending, Will beg a penny by and by.
-Conrad Aiken
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The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.
-Aristotle
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They Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning -- all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything -- they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.
-Aristotle
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I've never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It's probably because they have forgotten their own.
-Margaret Atwood
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Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
-Francis Bacon
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Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
-Natalie Clifford Barney
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I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
-James Barrie
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What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.
-Georges Bernanos
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Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. Ecclesiastes 11:9
-Bible
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It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Lamentations 3:27
-Bible
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Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.
-Ambrose Bierce
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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
-Josh Billings
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Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.
-Jim Bishop, Age of Consent to What?, "Shrewsbury NJ Daily Register", April 26, 1979
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But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.
-Louise Bogan
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I'm trying very hard to understand this generation. They have adjusted the timetable for childbearing so that menopause and teaching a sixteen-year-old how to drive a car will occur in the same week.
-Erma Bombeck
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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
-Anita Brookner
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What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
-Robert Browning
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The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.
-Pearl Buck
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Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.
-Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
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The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
-Edmund Burke
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So much alarmed that she is quite alarming, All Giggle, Blush, half Pertness, and half Pout.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Today's younger generation is no worse than my own. We were just as ignorant and repulsive as they are, but nobody listened to us.
-Al Capp
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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.
-Thomas Carlyle
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Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough, as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.
-Lord Chesterfield
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No man knows he is young while he is young.
-G. K. Chesterton
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There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
-Deepak Chopra
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A sensual and intemperate youth translates into an old worn-out body.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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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.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
-Cyril Connolly
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I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself.
-Joseph Conrad
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The young always have the same problem -- how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
-Quentin Crisp
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The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.
-Midge Decter
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Youth, what man's age is like to be, doth show; We may our ends by our beginnings know.
-Sir John Denham
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A boy's story is the best that is ever told.
-Charles Dickens
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The Youth of a Nation are the trustees of posterity.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Youth is the trustee of prosperity.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.
-Meister Eckhart
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The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government the best of everything is yet to be done by them.
-John Erskine
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If youth but knew; if age but could.
-Henri Estienne
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Youth holds no society with grief.
-Euripides
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Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor.
-Euripides
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The big mistake that men make is that when they turn thirteen or fourteen and all of a sudden they've reached puberty, they believe that they like women. Actually, you're just horny. It doesn't mean you like women any more at twenty-one than you did at ten.
-Jules Feiffer
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They mustn't know my despair, I can't let them see the wounds which they have caused, I couldn't bear their sympathy and their kind-hearted jokes, it would only make me want to scream all the more. If I talk, everyone thinks I'm showing off; when I'm silent they think I'm ridiculous; rude if I answer, sly if I get a good idea, lazy if I'm tired, selfish if I eat a mouthful more than I should, stupid, cowardly, crafty, etc. etc.
-Anne Frank
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Young men wish; love, money and health. One day, they'll say; health, money and love.
-Paul Geraldy
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Youth troubles over eternity, age grasps at a day and is satisfied to have even the day.
-Dame Mary Gilmore
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Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.
-Johann von Goethe
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The arrogance of the young is a direct result of not having known enough consequences. The turkey that every day greedily approaches the farmer who tosses him grain is not wrong. It is just that no one ever told him about Thanksgiving.
-Harry Golden, The Right Time: The Autobiography of Harry Golden, 1969
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Childhood is a disease -- a sickness that you grow out of.
-William Golding
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As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.
-Franz Grillparzer
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On the neck of a young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.
-Hafiz
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Do not commit the error common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.
-Jan De Hartog
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Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn't matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls.
-Anthony Hope Hawkins
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I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint.
-Hesiod
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Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.
-Aaron Hill
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Youth, abundant wealth, high birth, and inexperience, are, each of them a source of ruin. What then must be the fate of those in whom all four are combined.
-Hitopadesa
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Youth itself is a talent -- a perishable talent.
-Eric Hoffer
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Perhaps a modern society can remain stable only by eliminating adolescence, by giving its young, from the age of ten, the skills, responsibilities, and rewards of grownups, and opportunities for action in all spheres of life. Adolescence should be a time of useful action, while book learning and scholarship should be a preoccupation of adults.
-Eric Hoffer
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Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.
-Herbert Hoover
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Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.
-Horace
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Youth is about the only thing worth having, and that is about the only thing youth has.
-Edward W. Howe
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So different are the colors of life, as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past; and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
-Samuel Johnson
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Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.
-Samuel Johnson
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The desire of advising has a very extensive prevalence; and, since advice cannot be given but to those that will hear it, a patient listener is necessary to the accommodation of all those who desire to be confirmed in the opinion of their own wisdom: a patient listener, however, is not always to be had; the present age, whatever age is present, is so vitiated and disordered, that young people are readier to talk than to attend, and good counsel is only thrown away upon those who are full of their own perfections.
-Samuel Johnson, July 21, 1753
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I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.
-Howard M. Jones
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The passions of the young are vices in the old.
-Joseph Joubert
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Ask the young. They know everything.
-Joseph Joubert
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The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
-Carl Gustav Jung
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Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
-Franz Kafka
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It is not possible for civilization to flow backward while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance its allotted length.
-Helen Keller
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....he thinks about his boyhood, and he mourns his vanished youth - Now, who would live his life again, or face it? Tell the truth. I am mighty glad my boyhood and my youth are far away- I am in the straight for Fifty
-Henry Lawson, When there is Trouble on Your Mind
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Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
-Fran Lebowitz
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Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
-Max Lerner
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You are only young once, and if you work it right, once is enough.
-Joe E. Lewis
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A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.
-Percy Wynham Lewis
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Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.
-Ben Lindsey
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A youth with his first cigar makes himself sick; a youth with his first girl makes everybody sick.
-Mary Little
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The young, whether they know it or not, live on borrowed property.
-Richard Livingstone
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Youth comes but once in a lifetime.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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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
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If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
-James Russell Lowell
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It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who has lost it.
-W. Somerset Maugham
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Let a man turn to his own childhood -- no further -- if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.
-Alice Meynell
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Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Nobody that matters, that is.
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth.
-Henry Miller
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The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
-John Milton
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Childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
-John Milton
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There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.
-Mary Wortley Montagu
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You never know what peace is until you walk on the shores or in the fields or along the winding red roads of Prince Edward Island in a summer twilight when the dew is falling and the old stars are peeping out and the sea keeps its mighty tryst with the little land it loves. You find your soul then. You realize that youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.
-Lucy Maud Montgomery
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In grade school, I was a complete geek. You know, there's always the kid who's too short, the kid who wears glasses, the kid who's not athletic. Well, I was all three.
-Julianne Moore
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The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
-Malcolm Muggeridge
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Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.
-Pablo Neruda
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Youth does not require reasons for living, it only needs pretexts.
-Jos
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The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
-George Orwell
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Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
-Camille Anna Paglia
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The world is passing through troubling times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.
-Peter the Hermit, attributed, probably apochryphal
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Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. You are as old as your doubt, your fear, your despair. The way to keep young is to keep your faith young. Keep your self-confidence young. Keep your hope young.
-Luella F. Phean
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Youth doesn't reason, it acts. The old man reasons and would like to make the others act in his place.
-Francis Picabia
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What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
-Pablo Picasso
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Some old men, continually praise the time of their youth. In fact, you would almost think that there were no fools in their days, but unluckily they themselves are left as an example.
-Alexander Pope
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Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.
-V. S. Pritchett
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
-Marcel Proust
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The stories of childhood leave an indelible impression, and their author always has a niche in the temple of memory from which the image is never cast out to be thrown on the rubbish heap of things that are outgrown and outlived.
-Howard Pyle
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Use your youth so that you may have comfort to remember it when it has forsaken you, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof.
-Sir Walter Raleigh
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When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that's news. If they aren't, that's news too.
-Kenneth Rexroth
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I'm really glad that your young people missed the Depression I'm really glad that your young people missed the Depression and missed the big war. But I do regret that they missed the leaders that I knew, leaders who told us when things were tough and that we'd have to sacrifice, and that these difficulties might last awhile. They brought us together and they gave us a sense of national purpose.
-Ann Richards
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Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
-Arthur Rimbaud
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When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.
-Arthur Rimbaud
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Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.
-Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Youth covets; let not this covetousness seduce you.
-Friedrich von Schiller
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It is the failing of youth not to be able to restrain its own violence.
-Seneca (Seneca the Elder)
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A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.
-William Shakespeare
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Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?
-William Shakespeare
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I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the anciently, stealing, fighting.
-William Shakespeare
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Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw
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It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
-George Bernard Shaw
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The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of their blood.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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Don't let young people tell you their aspirations; when they drop them they will drop you.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
-Logan Pearsall Smith
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It was remarked to me by the late Mr. Charles Roupell . . . that to play billiards well was a sign of an ill-spent youth.
-Herbert Spencer, In Life and Letters of Spencer, ch. 20, by Duncan.
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To be young is all there is in the world. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) --but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
-Wallace Stevens
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For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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In the first day of my youth I tried to find it in the creatures, as I saw others do: but the more I sought, the less I found it, and the nearer I went to it, the further off it was. For of every image that appeared to me, before I had fully tested it, or abandoned myself to peace in it, and inner voice said to me: 'This is not what thou seekest.'
-Heinrich Suso
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Youth should be a savings bank.
-Madame Swetchine
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Like a kite cut from the string, lightly the soul of my youth has taken flight
-Ishikawa Takuboku
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Come children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
-William Makepeace Thackeray
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Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then in middle age they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
-James Thurber
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Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?
-Thomas Traherne
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It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
-Mark Twain
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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, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
-Samuel Ullman
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Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
-Source Unknown
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After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth and I suppose for older people the love of youth in others.
-Source Unknown
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The good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
-Source Unknown
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If only, If only, life was as simple as it was during childhood.
-Source Unknown
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Youth has become a class.
-Roger Vadim
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Youth today must be strong, unafraid, and a better taxpayer than its father.
-H. V. Wade
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What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.
-Evelyn Waugh
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There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
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The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
-Alfred North Whitehead
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Youth, large, lusty, loving -- Youth, full of grace, force, fascination. Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
-Walt Whitman
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Those whom the gods love grow young.
-Oscar Wilde
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In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
-Oscar Wilde
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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
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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
-Thornton Wilder
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Youth is that period when a young boy knows everything but how to make a living.
-Carey Williams
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The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
-Woodrow Wilson
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Young people need models, not critics...
-John Wooden
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That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
-Virginia Woolf
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Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
-William Wordsworth
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Let us fill a cup and drink to that most noble, ridiculous, laughable, sublime figure in our lives...The Young Man Who Was. Let us drink to his dreams, for they were rainbow-colored; to his appetites, for they were strong; to his blunders, for they were huge; to his pains for they were sharp; to his time for it was brief; and to his end, for it was to become one of us.
-Herman Wouk, Aurora Dawn 1947
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Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
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