Quotes about youth

Young people -it is obvious -cannot achieve such a relationship, but they can, if they understand their life properly, grow up slowly to such happiness and prepare themselves for it. They must not forget, when they love, that they are beginners, bunglers of life, apprentices in love- must learn love, and that like all learning wants peace, patience, and composure.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.

"Eh, Manuel, and will you re-model the world?"

"Who knows?" says Manuel, in the high pride of his youth. "At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered."

"The Poet had, who had made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves — which, as Niketas remarked with a smile — was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.

No, I never wish that. I don't intend to die till I've enjoyed my life. Everyone has a right to happiness and sooner or later I will have it. Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them.

The young always have the same problem — how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.

Exhibitionism is like a drug. Hooked in adolescence I was now taking doses so massive they would have killed a novice.

As long as there is life, every ending is a beginning. And I would save humankind, even from itself. This is why no death in the perpetuation of humankind can be a complete failure. This is why a birth touches us so deeply. This is why the most tragic death is the death of a youth.

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist — a master — and that is what Auguste Rodin was — can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…. and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…. no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired — but it does to them. Look at her!

"I am the most miserable person who ever lived", he said to the Lord Primus, when they stopped to feed the horses feedbags of damp oats.

"You are young, and in love", said Primus. "Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived".

"You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying sense of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs.

Youth is like spring, an overpraised season.