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

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.

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

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.

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.

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

The young leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.

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

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

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

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

No one’s serious at seventeen.

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