Youth has to do with spirit, not age. Men of seventy or sixty are often more youthful than the young. Theirs is the real youth.
—Henry Miller
If I had known when I was twenty-one that I should be as happy as I am now, I should have been sincerely shocked. They promised me wormwood and the funeral raven.
—Christopher Isherwood
When I was young, I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I'm one of them.
—Ray Bradbury in Dandelion Wine
No, there's nothing half so sweet in life as love's young dream.
—Thomas Moore
Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
—Logan Pearsall Smith
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
—Dave Barry
Even very recently, the elders could say [to the youths]: "You know, I have been young and you never have been old." But today's young people can reply: "You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be." . . . This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.
—Margaret Mead
How can one accept — let alone enjoy — aging in a culture where God is twenty-five; where advertisements are filled with twenty-somethings in halter tops and tight t-shirts, unless the ad is for a drug to treat incontinence, high blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol? What about the wisdom of age? What about endurance? What about the beauty of a face etched by years that were not always easy?
—Genie Zeiger
There are two barriers that often prevent communication between the young and their elders. The first is middle-aged forgetfulness of the fact that they themselves are no longer young. The second is youthful ignorance of the fact that the middle aged are still alive.
—Jessamyn West
Frederick William was deeply disappointed by his son, the future Frederick the Great, who in his youth seemed more interested in French culture, music, and literature than in the military virtues. The father's disaffection turned to actual hatred, and his treatment became so harsh that the young prince decided to run away, with the aid of two accomplices, Lieutenants Katte and Keith. The plan was discovered; Keith escaped, but the prince and Katte were captured and court-martialed. Katte was sentenced to life imprisonment, Frederick to solitary confinement. Frederick William, deciding that Katte's sentence was too lenient, had him beheaded in the presence of Prince Frederick. This drastic measure had the desired effect; Frederick asked the king's pardon and began to apply himself to acquiring the Prussian military philosophy.
—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
—Herbert Henry Asquith
One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.
—Randall Jarrell
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
—George Bernard Shaw
Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.
—Jim Bishop