Youth

"Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always."

"We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow; Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so."

"If it is true that the implosion of meaning and perspective characterises the current third age of capitalism, which has not only won against social and artistic criticism, but has won too much, then young people are the first victims. Young people live on meaning and perspective. This was said very well by the Romantics, and by Fichte in particular. The transformation of young people into a consumerist generational group is indeed a worrying historical novelty. If teachers around the world are noticing a decline in students' logical abilities, this is due to the fact that the capitalist general intellect has now reached such a level of anonymous incorporation of knowledge that there is less and less need for a family where people talk and a school where people reason. The youth issue is therefore historical and philosophical, not psychological and pedagogical. Young people must regain meaning and perspective. Then, we will immediately see them magically recover their logical, expressive and emotional abilities."

"Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...]."

"Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young... and I seem to have forgotten lately."

"Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth."

"My salad days; When I was green in judgment."

"The spirit of a youth That means to be of note, begins betimes."

"The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon; Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes. The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth, Contagious blastments are most imminent."

"For youth no less becomes The light and careless livery that it wears, Than settled age his sables, and his weeds Importing health and graveness."

"Is in the very May-morn of his youth, Ripe for exploits and mighty enterprises."

"He that is more than a youth, is not for me, and he that is less than man, I am not for him."

"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing."

"O brave youth, how good for thee it were couldst thou be made to understand how infinitely precious are thy school years—years when thou hast leisure to grow, when new worlds break in upon thee, and thou fashionest thy being in the light of the ideals of truth and goodness and beauty! If now thou dost not fit thyself to become free and whole, thou shalt, when the doors of this fair mother-house of the mind, close behind thee, be driven into ways that lead to bondage, be compelled to do that which cripples and dwarfs; for the work whereby men gain a livelihood involves mental and moral mutilation, unless it be done in the spirit of religion and culture. Ah! well for thee, canst thou learn while yet there is time that it will profit thee nothing to become the possessor of millions, if the price thou payest is thy manhood."

"At first it had been youth's ideal of what youth should be, a pattern woven of fanatical loyalty, irresponsible gaiety, comradeship, physical gusto, and not a little pure devilry."

"Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, , wisdom, , and this post-heroic absence of agitation."

"The pleasure and sadness of youth is that the speed of its passing is never thought about; and so you say that you will do this or that in a year, in five years, only to wake up one morning to realize that what you thought was infinitely prolonged has ended."

"What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys, Though the deep heart of existence beat forever like a boy's?"

"Newborn lifeforms – babies, puppies, kittens, lambs, and so on... are fragile, delicate, not yet firmly established in materiality. An innocence, a sweetness and beauty that are not of this world still shine through them. They delight even relatively insensitive humans."

"'There was a time,' Nikolai Artemyevitch resumed, 'when daughters did not allow themselves to look down on their parents—when the parental authority forced the disobedient to tremble. That time has passed, unhappily: so at least many persons imagine; but let me tell you, there are still laws which do not permit—do not permit—in fact there are still laws. I beg you to mark that: there are still laws——'"

"Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of red cheeks, red lips and supple knees. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a tempermental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease. This often exists in a man of fifty, more than in a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair—these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being's heart a love of wonder; the sweet amazement at the stars and starlike things and thoughts; the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what comes next, and the joy in the game of life. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of your heart there is a wireless station. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, grandeur, courage, and power from the earth, from men and from the Infinite—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and the central places of your heart are covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then are you grown old, indeed!"

"If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulses of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavor is to subdue our children’s spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life."

"Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi Prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus Et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis."

"On one of our regular Friday night visits to the Seventy-third Street public library, my father encourage me to borrow 's celebrated 1926 book, Microbe Hunters. In it were fascinating stories of how infectious diseases were being conquered by scientists who went after bad germs with the same tenacity as Sherlock Holmes pursuing the evil Dr. Moriarity. Some months later I brought home Arrowsmith, in which Sinclair Lewis, helped by Paul de Kruif as expert consultant, relates the never-realized hope of his hero to save victims from by treating then with bacteria-killing viruses. The 's youth gripped me and made me realize that science could be like : a young man's game whose stars made their mark in their early twenties."

"In several educational institutions during the last few years manifestation of student activity in riots has been exciting the country. To the conservative mind, these riots bode no good. As a matter of fact student riots of one sort or another, protests against the order that is, kicks against college and university management indicate a healthy growth and a normal functioning of the academic mind. Youth should be radical. Youth should demand change in the world. Youth should not accept the old order if the world is to move on. But the old orders should not be moved easily—certainly not at the mere whim or behest of youth. There must be clash and if youth hasn't enough force or fervor to produce the clash the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay. If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vim and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow."

"Being young don’t earn you a damn thing in my book."

"Adolescents are simply those people who haven't as yet chosen between childhood and adulthood. For as long as anyone tries to hold on to the advantages of childhood—the freedom from responsibility, principally—while seeking to lay claim to the best parts of adulthood, such as independence, he is an adolescent. ... Eventually most people choose to be adults, or are forced into it. A very few retreat into childhood and never leave it again. A large number remain adolescents for life."

"Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor; Part with it as with money, sparing; pay No moment but in purchase of its worth, And what it's worth, ask death-beds; they can tell."

"Youth dreams a bliss on this side death. It dreams a rest, if not more deep, More grateful than this marble sleep; It hears a voice within it tell: Calm's not life's crown, though calm is well. 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, But 'tis not what our youth desires."

"Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business."

"I was between A man and a boy, A hobble-de-hoy, A fat, little, punchy concern of sixteen."

"Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth."

"Our youth we can have but to-day; We may always find time to grow old."

"Young fellows will be young fellows."

"And both were young, and one was beautiful."

"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."

"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."

"Teneris, heu, lubrica moribus ætas!"

"Life went a-Maying With Nature, Hope, and Poesy; * When I was young! When I was young?—Ah, woful when!"

"A young Apollo, golden haired, Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life."

"Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, We love the play-place of our early days; The scene is touching, and the heart is stone, That feels not at that sight, and feels at none."

"Youth, what man's age is like to be, doth show; We may our ends by our beginnings know."

"Youth should watch joys and shoot them as they fly."

"Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so."

"Angelicus juvenis senibus satanizat in annis."

"Si jeunesse savoit, si vieillesse pouvoit."

"Youth holds no society with grief."

"O happy unown'd youths! your limbs can bear The scorching dog-star and the winter's air, While the rich infant, nurs'd with care and pain, Thirsts with each heat and coughs with every rain!"

"Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly rising o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes, Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm."

"The insect-youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honied spring, And float amid the liquid noon!"