Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

Even members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children. 

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage. 

A dissolute and intemperate youth hands down the body to old age in a worn-out state.

A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

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

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

No one’s serious at seventeen.