If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.
—Bill Watterson
What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement [of the adolescent] in the decision making.
—Laurence Steinberg and Ann Levine
The skepticism of youth signals the beginning of a search for something actually worth trusting, both within one's own psyche and in the world. That's why teens, supposedly stuck in life's lost years, are often so unequivocal about what they love and what they hate, and so frustrated when they feel misunderstood. The adolescent spirit is not the spirit of the lost. It is the conviction that you are not lost—that wandering has a purpose, and that what you deserve more than anything is the freedom to walk awhile on your own path.
—Ann Powers
When you're young, you always think you'll meet all sorts of wonderful people, that drifting apart and losing friends is natural. You don't worry, at first, about the friends you leave behind. But as you get older, it gets harder to build friendships. Too many defenses, too little opportunity. You get busy. And by the time you realize that you've lost the dearest best friend you've ever had, years have gone by and you're mature enough to be embarrassed by your attitude and, frankly, by your arrogance.
—Kate Jacobs in The Friday Night Knitting Club
I guess every generation is doomed to fight its war,… suffer the loss of the same old illusions, and learn the same old lessons on its own.
—Philip Caputo
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
—Alfred North Whitehead
When you're eighteen your emotions are violent, but they're not durable.
—W. Somerset Maugham
Care keeps his watch in every old man's eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie;
But where unbruised youth with unstuff'd brain
Doth couch his limbs, there golden sleep doth reign.
—William Shakespeare
The secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.
—Anne Rice
Youth is something very new: twenty years ago no one mentioned it.
—Coco Chanel
What a mistake to suppose that the passions are strongest in youth! The passions are not stronger, but the control over them is weaker! They are more easily excited, they are more violent and apparent; but they have less energy, less durability, less intense and concentrated power than in the maturer life.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it's a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new and make a difference.
—Evelyn Waugh
What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.
—Friedrich Nietzsche