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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881Quotes
Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.
—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
—George Eliot, 1860The boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.
—Plato, c. 348 BCEven members of the nobility, let alone persons of no consequence, would do well not to have children.
—Yoshida Kenko, c. 1330No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.
—Bessie Smith, 1926I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.
—Groucho Marx, 1959The young man must store up, the old man must use.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 63Ah, there are no children nowadays.
—Molière, 1673The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747A sick child is always the mother’s property; her own feelings generally make it so.
—Jane Austen, 1816I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
—Lord Byron, 1813The 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.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968