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

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

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

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

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

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

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.

Youth, youth, springtime of beauty.

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

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

Ah, there are no children nowadays.

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.

Bright youth passes as quickly as thought.