Quotes About Youth

When I was still a rather precocious young man, I already realized most vividly the futility of the hopes and aspirations that most men pursue throughout their lives.

How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

The pioneers of a warless world are the [youth] who refuse military service.

Common sense is that layer of prejudices which we acquire before we are sixteen.

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. —"Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64

I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they hugged that bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.

The high sentences—ten years' imprisonment each for convictions in Texas and California concerning possession of LSD and marijuana, and conviction (later overturned) with a sentence of thirty years' imprisonment for marijuana smuggling—show that the punishment of these offenses was only a pretext: the real aim was to put under lock and key the seducer and instigator of youth, who could not otherwise be prosecuted.

Now, I want to remember all this. My life has known days of innocence when I had only to close my eyes in order not to see.

all dark and serious, really. You know, the simplest thing in the world is for white kids that are a little bit troubled to go really pompous on it all—like you get a splinter in your finger and suddenly you have a whole grindcore

People form their real friendships before they're twenty-five,—generally, before they are twenty,—I think. Up to that time we're trustful and hideously disinterested; and after that age we get to liking people for the amount of amusement or profit or inspiration we can drag from them. But, up to then, it's friendship because—well, just because it's friendship. That's the way it was with us, anyhow.

Los años arrugan la piel, pero renunciar al entusiasmo arruga el alma.

If I die very young, hear this: I was never anything but a kid playing. I was a heathen like the sun and the water, I had the universal religion only people don't have. I was happy because I didn't ask for anything at all, Or tried to find anything, And I didn't find any more explanation Than the word explanation having no meaning at all.

Y por primera vez capto que ser joven no significa sólo tener pocos años, sino sentir más de la cuenta, sentir tanto que crees que vas a explotar.

The bird of youth flies away and doesn't come back. Fly, boy, fly!

In my fool hardy youth, when my friends were dreaming of heroic deeds in the realms of engineering and law, finance and national politics, I dreamt of becoming a librarian.

Giovanotto è inutile che si arrampichi... qui è tutta pianura.

E ora cosa farò?" si domandava il ragazzo; ogni volta che osservava la mobilità e la continua agitazione della vita, la propria inerzia gli incuteva spavento.

Young men go to war. Sometimes because they are have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.

It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

Growing up is never straight forward. There are moments when everything is fine, and other moments where you realize that there are certain memories that you'll never get back, and certain people that are going to change, and the hardest part is knowing that there's nothing you can do except watch them.

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.

What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas.