Quotes about youth

He was still young enough to hate looking like a fool more than anything in the world.

Well. You were allowed to be young and stupid, when you were young and stupid, and if it didn’t do you in, you might get older and wiser.

Old enough to look as if he knew what to do, young enough to look as if he could do it.

Young soldiers had a lot of expectations and fantasies about how it would be and what they would do and feel. Invariably wrong, those expectations.

Hold the period of youth sacred to education, and the period of maturity, when the physical forces begin to flag, equally sacred to ease and agreeable relaxation.

I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took on a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves.

Maybe one day I’ll be able to live somewhere with a garden. I’ll be old but skilled enough to still have some consultancy work to pay for the space to grow real food. Hands in the dirt again. Doing something real. No people around. Yeah, that’s the dream. Strange how the things we rail against and hate in our youth can be the things we crave as we get older.

I made a mistake when I was young and didn’t know how the world worked and I have paid for it. Many, many times over.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable through they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

They scolded us for not having any real hopes or real ambitions, but if we were to pursue our true ideals, would these people watch and guide us along the way?

Well, I suppose we have to have young intellectuals, if we’re ever to survive to be middle-aged philosophers.

He has little appetite for banter. He knows the dangers of the path I have chosen to walk, and he doubts me because the old do not remember the necessities of youth. They see only the years on our horizon to which they think we are entitled. But we are entitled only to the moment, and owe nothing to the future except that we follow our convictions.