Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Youth

"Youth is a wonderful thing: what a crime to waste it on children." - George Bernard Shaw

"Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing." - George Bernard Shaw

"Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness." - George Santayana

"Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad functions." - George Santayana

"Fell luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksands, poverty or chains." - Hannah More

"What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn." -

"Let me but live from year to year, with forward face and unreluctant soul; not hurrying to, nor turning from, the goal; not mourning for the things that disappear in the dim past, nor holding back in fear from what the future veils; but with a whole and happy heart, that pays its toll to Youth and Age, and travels with cheer. So let the way wind up the hill or down o’er rough and smooth, the journey will be joy: still seeking what I sought when but a boy, new friendship, high adventure, and a crown, my heart will keep the courage of the quest, and hope the road’s last turn will be the best." - Henry Van Dyke

"The motives and purposes of authors are not always so pure and high, as, in the enthusiasm of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn to call them home, like laborers from the field, at dinner-time, and they think themselves lucky to get the dinner." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Age and youth look upon life from the opposite ends of the telescope; to the one it is exceedingly long, to the other exceedingly short." - Henry Ward Beecher

"In youth and beauty wisdom, is but rare!" - Homer NULL

"When young, we trust ourselves too much and we trust others too little when old. Rashness is the error of youth, timid caution of age. Manhood is the isthmus between the two extremes; the ripe and fertile season of action, when alone we can hope to find the head to contrive, united with the hand to execute." - James Bryant Conant

"Youth is the time to study wisdom; old age is the time to practice it." -

"Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them, have a marked life cycle. In youth they are vigorous, aggressive, evangelistic, and even intolerant. Later they mellow, and in old age – after a matter of ten or fifteen years – they become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile." - John Kenneth Galbraith, aka "Ken"

"Age alway ough to be a myrrour for youth, for where olde age is impudent, there certainly youth must needes be shamlesse." - John Lyly or Lilly or Lylie

"Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature to lust. It means, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual and difficult work, to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise, but above all - by example." - John Ruskin

"The whole period of youth is one essentially of formation, edification, instruction, I use the words with their weight in them; in taking of stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes and faiths. There is not an hour of it but is trembling with destinies, not a moment of which, once past, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron." - John Ruskin

"The soul, secured in her existence, smiles at the drawn dagger and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; but thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, unhurt amidst the war of elements, the wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds." - Joseph Addison

"To a thong of aging infants, the consumer society holds out the promise of eternal youth, of an enchanted mirror in which the customer can see himself reflected in the transfiguring light of immortality." - Lewis H. Lapham

"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." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"Books are the food of youth, the delight of old age; the ornament of prosperity, the refuge and comfort of adversity; a delight at home, and no hindrance abroad; companions by night, in traveling, in the country." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"Rashness is a quality of the budding-time of youth, prudence of the harvest-time of old age." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"It was long ago observed that `rites of passage’ play a considerable part in the life of religious man. Certainly, the outstanding passage rite is represented by the puberty initiation, passage from one age group to another (from childhood or adolescence to youth). But there is also a passage rite at birth, at marriage, at death, and it could gbe said that each of these cases always involves an initiation, for each of them implies a radical change in ontological and social status." - Mircea Eliade

"Consider! Behind you lie the confusions and inadequacies of that remarkably over-rated period of human existence known as youth. Youth has vitality, its true; youth has a superabundance of “free energy.” But it has little else. It lacks poise. It lacks experience. Above all, it has neither judgment nor wisdom, the two qualities which make life supremely worth while... the rewards of self-knowledge are enormous... self-knowledge is the key to self-mastery... Calm, assured, integrated people have a way of making considerable impact on reality. By changing themselves, they change the world around them." - Norman Vincent Peale

"The youth who follows his appetites too soon seizes the cup, before it has received its best ingredients, and by anticipating his pleasures, robs the remaining parts of life of their share, so that his eagerness only produces a manhood of imbecility and an age of pain." - Oliver Goldsmith

"A boy will learn more true wisdom in a public school in a year than a private education in five. It is not from masters, but from their equals, that youth learn a knowledge of the world." - Oliver Goldsmith

"Ask me no questions, and I'll tell you no lies." - Oliver Goldsmith

"All of us who are worth anything spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"He who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden." - Plato NULL

"The True lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth." - Plato NULL

"In youth good men often appear to be simple, and are easily practiced upon by the dishonest, because they have no examples of what evil is in their own souls." - Plato NULL

"Character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nature is sanitive, refining, elevating. How cunning she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch; of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purpose with the bloom of youth and joy." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, so near is God to man, when duty whispers low, "Thou must," the youth replies, "I can."" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed and the quest sees now how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had believed to be true since my earliest youth. And since that time, I have been convinced that I must once and for all seriously try to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted and begin to build anew, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure for my beliefs." - René Descartes

"I go to school to youth to learn the future." - Robert Frost

"Few indeed are they who are so happy as to have passed their youth without committing any damnable sins, either by dissolute or violent conduct, or by following some godless and unlawful opinions." -

"Wisdom sought in old age fades like letters traced in sand, whilst that obtained in youth may endure like letters graved in stone." - Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron

"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind." - Samuel Ullman

"Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind, it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness off the deep springs of life. Youth means the temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a boy of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living." - Samuel Ullman

"Who, in this world, can be called pure? He whose mind is pure. Who can be called wise? He who can discriminate between the real and the unreal. Who is the greatest hero? The person who is not terror-stricken by the arrows which shoot from the eyes of a beauty. Who is poor? He who is not contented. What rolls quickly away, like drops of water from a lotus leaf? Youth, wealth and the years of a person’s life." - Adi Shankara, aka Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya

"Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy, that gives indolence of body with an equality of mind; the best guardian of youth and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion, and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelary goddess of health and universal medicine of life." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet

"In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for everything. To be young is to be as one of the immortals." - William Hazlitt

"Almost everything that is great has been done by youth." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"In our extreme youth, in our most humiliating sorrow, we think we are alone. When we are older we find that others have suffered too. " - Bernard M. Martin, D.D

"Youth is that period when a boy knows everything but how to make a living." - Carey McWilliams