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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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 leading the young is like the blind leading the blind.

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

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.

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