Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

Youth, youth, springtime of beauty.

No one’s serious at seventeen.

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

The young man must store up, the old man must use.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

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.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

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

Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.