Youth
Quotes - Realize your youth while you have it
“Beauty
is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the
reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only
a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth
goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that
there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against
your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and
dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold
of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or
giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live
the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always
searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you
for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a
little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they
blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a
month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green
night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our
youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs
fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory
of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations
that we had not the courage to yield to...Youth! Youth! There is absolutely
nothing in the world but youth.”
―
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Realize
your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening
to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your
life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims,
the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let
nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of
nothing”
―
Oscar Wilde
“The
very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that
they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue
sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.”
―
Elizabeth Goudge
“I
am firmly convinced to-day that, generally speaking, it is in youth that men
lay the essential groundwork of their creative thought, wherever that creative
thought exists. I make a distinction between the wisdom of age- which can only
arise from the greater profundity and foresight that are based on the
experiences of a long life- and the creative genius of youth, which blossoms
out in thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, without being able to
put these into practice immediately, because of their very superabundance.
These furnish the building materials and plans for the future; and it is from
them that age takes the stones and builds the edifice, unless the so-called
wisdom of the years may have smothered the creative genius of youth.”
―
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“While
one is young is the time to investigate, to experiment with everything. The
school should help its young people to discover their vocations and
responsibilities, and not merely cram their minds with facts and technical
knowledge; it should be the soil in which they can grow without fear, happily
and integrally.”
―
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life
“I
don't ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no.
Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.”
―
Tennessee Williams, Sweet Bird of Youth
“When
we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all
definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the
course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net
value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after
year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is
a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays
“We
were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”
―
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
“I
feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth
betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.”
―
Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin
“The
same teen who can't legally operate a four-wheeler, or [ATV]...in a farm lane
workplace environment can operate a jacked-up F-250 pickup on a crowded urban
expressway. By denying these [farm work] opportunities to bring value to their
own lives and the community around them, we've relegated our young adults to
teenage foolishness. Then as a culture we walk around shaking our heads in
bewilderment at these young people with retarded maturity. Never in life do
people have as much energy as in their teens, and to criminalize leveraging it
is certainly one of our nation's greatest resource blunders.”
―
Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens,
Healthier People, and a Better World
“No
intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in
with it. Collective thought is stupid because it's collective. Nothing passes
into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border--like a
toll--most of the intelligence it contained.
In
youth we're twofold. Our innate intelligence, which may be considerable,
coexists with the stupidity of our inexperience, which forms a second, lesser
intelligence. Only later on do the two unite. That's why youth always blunders
- not because of its inexperience, but because of its non-unity.
Today
the only course left for the man of superior intelligence is abdication.”
―
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“Children
are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things
people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any
kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.”
―
Floyd Dell
“The
achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the
realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the
world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might
entail.”
―
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
