Quotes about Youth

What is admirable in the clash of young minds is that no one can foresee the spark that sets off an explosion or predict what kind of explosion it will be.

You know—we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being fought by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. "My God, my God—" I said to myself, "it's the Children's Crusade."

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.

A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue something higher- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books.

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

The genius of lyric poetry is the genius of inexperience.

He is precisely the young man to fall headlong in love and repent it for the rest of his life.

A man came up to her. Expensively tailored suit. Okay, he wasn't exactly a man because he was only thirty-five. But he was trying.

When I was in S Club Juniors I had very long, straight, brown hair and I never really played around with it. I was very young and the team told me that I had to leave it alone, so the minute S Club Juniors disbanded I decided to cut it short.