Quotes About Youth

I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles in my life while still too young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table.

It's odd how one's memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up—one's recollections of growth itself—have to be so tragic? I still haven't found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.

There's no doubt that he'll be heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty—like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?

U mladosti duhovni saputnici su nam prijatelji i knjige. Ali najve?a razlika izme?u prijatelja i knjiga je ta da se prijatelji menjaju, a knjige ne. Knjiga, ?ak i ako skuplja prašinu na polici ili u nekom uglu sobe, uporno ?uva svoj karakter i svoju filozofiju. Prihvataju?i je ili odbacuju?i je, ?itaju?i je ili ne, mi samo možemo da promenimo naš stav prema njoj, i to je sve.

Perché i tempi sono degenerati fino a questo punto? Perché la gioventù, l'ambizione e la semplicità sono decadute e il mondo è diventato così biasimevole?

There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.

It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty.

I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, 'I want to change into him', thinking, 'I want to be him'.

Avevo imparato ad atteggiare le labbra al sorriso di chi la sa lunga sulle vicende del mondo, un sorriso simile a quello di un giovane sacerdote. Avevo il senso di non essere né vivo né morto.

Non è esagerato dire che il primo problema che affrontai in vita mia fu quello della bellezza.

A todo el mundo le ocurre lo mismo, todos los seres humanos son iguales- replicó el viejo escritor, alzando la voz. -Pero creer lo contrario es el privilegio de la juventud.

Como les sucede a tantos jovenes, pues vivir la juventud es una muerte impetuosa y constante, ellos aspiraban continuamente a una nueva destrucción. Un hermoso joven en el umbral de la muerte debe tener una sonrisa en los labios.

Wat een - hoe zal ik het zeggen - verblindend iets was dat hoongelach. Het wrede, bij hun leeftijd passende gelach van mijn klasgenoten leek mij een felle schittering te zijn als van licht, dat van een bundel baderen terugkaatst.

HOW ODDLY SITUATED a man is apt to find himself at age thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression.

Os livros e os amigos são os companheiros espirituais da juventude.

go-go hall on my way home from school.

Why is our era one of decadence? Why does the world despise vigor and youth and worthy ambitions and single-mindedness?…How long must this age of effete and the contemptible endure? Or is the worst still to come? Men think only of money and women. Men have forgotten everything that should be becoming to a man. that great shining age of gods and heroes passed away with the Meiji Emperor. Will we ever see its like again?

Even as he spoke, the boy appeared to have forgotten the subject, as if it was a balloon he had abandoned to the sky.

One letter that still remains very vivid in my mind was written in pencil on a piece of rice-paper in a youthful, almost careless scribble. If my memory is not mistaken, it was to the following effect, and broke off abruptly in just this fashion: "At the moment I am full of life, my whole body overflowing with youth and strength. It seems impossible that I shall be dead in three hours' time. And yet...

When he was young, there had been only one reality, and the future had seemed to stretch before him, swelling with immense possibilities. But as he grew older, reality seemed to take many forms, and it was the past that seemed refracted into innumerable possibilities

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we're unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they'll be talking about you and me. We'll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.