Quotes on Youth

He that compares what he has done with what he has left undone, will feel the effect which must always follow the comparison of imagination with reality; he will look with contempt on his own unimportance, and wonder to what purpose he came into the world; he will repine that he shall leave behind him no evidence of his having been, that he has added nothing to the system of life, but has glided from youth to age among the crowd, without any effort for distinction.

The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

Old age, especially an honored old age, has so great authority, that this is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.

Every stage of human life, except the last, is marked out by certain and defined limits; old age alone has no precise and determinate boundary.

"What greater gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?"

Rashness belongs to youth; prudence to old age.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honor and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence?

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

Old age deprives the intelligent man only of qualities useless to wisdom.

Socrates said, our only knowledge was_x000D_ _x000D_ "To know that nothing could be known;" a pleasant_x000D_ _x000D_ Science enough, which levels to an ass_x000D_ _x000D_ Each Man of Wisdom, future, past, or present._x000D_ _x000D_ Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas!_x000D_ _x000D_ Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent,_x000D_ _x000D_ That he himself felt only "like a youth_x000D_ _x000D_ Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth."

It is, indeed, only in old age that intellectual men attain their sublime expression, whilst portraits of them in their youth show only the first traces of it.

In a dream you are never eighty.

Perhaps love makes us grow old before our time and makes us young again when youth has passed.

Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

The demon of intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice to his rapacity?

In thy youth wast as true a lover, As ever sighed upon a midnight pillow

I fervently believe that, as someone has said before, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." I want to help change the way young people look at school, and hence, the way they look at their futures.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.