This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age. " - Dorothy Leigh Sayers
"All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved." - Elizabeth Bowen, Full name Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen
"An author ought to write for the youth of his generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of the afterward." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, fully Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
"Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains." - Hannah More
"“I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us." - Howard Mumford Jones
"Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all; when it first appears we can at least prevent its further growth. But do not on this account waste your breath on empty arguments to prove to the youth that he is like other men and subject to the same weaknesses. Make him feel it or he will never know it." -
"Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart's spoils. " - Jean-Antoine Petit-Senn
"Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all; when it first appears we can at least prevent its further growth. But do not on this account waste your breath on empty arguments to prove to the youth that he is like other men and subject to the same weaknesses. Make him feel it or he will never know it." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"The youth of the soul is everlasting and eternity is youth. " - Jean Paul, born Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, aka Jean Paul Richter
"The problem of our youth is not youth. The problem is the spirit of our age: denial of transcendence, the vapidity of values, emptiness in the heart, the decreased sensitivity to the imponderable quality of the spirit, the collapse of communication between the realm of tradition and the inner world of the individual. The central problem is that we do not know how to think, how to pray, how to cry, how to resist the deceptions of too many persuaders." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires, too soon, too soon - before life itself." - Joseph Conrad, born Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski
"In youth one has tears without grief; in age, griefs without tears." - Joseph Roux
"Let the American youth never forget, that they possess a noble inheritance, bought by the toils, and sufferings and blood of their ancestors; and capable, if wisely improved, and faithfully guarded, of transmitting to their latest posterity all the substantial blessings of life, the peaceful enjoyment of liberty, property, religion, and independence…Republics are created by the virture, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them." - Joseph Story
"No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan
"The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself." - Louis-Ferdinand Céline, pen name Louis-Ferdinand Destouches
"Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success." - Louisa May Alcott
"During adolescence imagination is boundless. The urge toward self-perfection is at its peak. And with all their self- absorption and personalized dreams of glory, youth are in pursuit of something larger than personal passions, some values or ideals to which they might attach their imaginations. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"Every human society endeavors to preserve itself by inventing the adolescence it requires. . . . Adults are prone to create myths about the meaning of adolescence. Whatever their political or personal inclinations, whether they glorify nature or revere society, whether they are identified with youth or they are detractors of youth, most adults find it imperative to defuse the awesome vitalities of these monsters, saints, and heroes. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing—not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness—so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents. " - Louise J. Kaplan
"There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions." - Ludwig von Mises, fully Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises
"We must learn that any person who will not accept what he knows to be truth for the very love of truth alone is very definitely undermining his mental integrity... you have not been a close observer of such men if you have not seen them shrivel, become commonplace, mean without influence, without friends, and without the enthusiasm of youth and growth, like a tree covered with fungus, the foliage deceased, the life gone out of the heart with dry rot and indelibly marked for destruction --- dead, but not yet handed over to the undertaker." - Luther Burbank
"The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence." - Lyman Bryson
"In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose." - Madame Swetchine, fully Anne Sophie Swetchine née Sophia Petrovna Soïmonov or Soymanof
"There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible. " - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"In youth we learn; in age we understand." - Maria Von Ebner-Eschenbach, or Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachová, Marie Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
"The sun of the mind, and the life of the heart is Wisdom. She is pure and full of light, crowning grey hairs with lustre, And kindling the eye of youth with a fire not its own." - Martin Tupper, fully Martin Farquhar Tupper
"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world." - Maurice Chevalier, fully Maurice Auguste Chevalier
"In youth we learn, in old age we understand." - Mexican Proverbs
"Make your educational laws strict and your criminal ones can be gentle; but if you leave youth its liberty you will have to dig dungeons for ages." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
"There is always some specific moment when we become aware that our youth is gone; but, years after, we know it was much later." - Mignon McLaughlin
"Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is; we marry without knowing what it is to be married; and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: The old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience." - Milan Kundera
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Instruction in youth is like engraving in stone." - Moroccan Proverbs
"All this emphasis on youth - I don’t buy it. Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don’t tell me it’s so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves... and in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live everyday when you don’t know what’s going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you’ll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you’ll be sexy - and you believe them! It’s such nonsense." - Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz
"Property is unstable, and youth perishes in a moment. Life itself is held in the grinning fangs of Death, yet men delay to obtain release from the world. Alas, the conduct of mankind is surprising." - Nāgārjuna, fully Acharya Nāgārjuna NULL
"In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude.. ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart..... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!...Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. " - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Self-reliance can turn a salesman into a merchant; a politician into a statesman; an attorney into a jurist; an unknown youth into a great leader. All are to be tomorrow's big leaders - those who in solitude sit above the clang and dust of time, with the world's secret trembling on their lips." - Newell Dwight Hillis
"In all the wild orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom." - Booth Tarkington, born Newton Booth Tarkington
"No one is bolder than the fool who does not know what makes it default : the spiritual, on the contrary, is shameful in youth before merit, believing that everyone feels and thinks like him, and better than he that everyone does what he must do and it only becomes bolder than in maturity, when he saw, from experience how other men are beneath him." - Nicholas-Edme Rétif or Restif, aka Rétif de la Bretonne
"What is stronger in us — passion or habit? Or are all the violent impulses, all the whirl of our desires and turbulent passions, only the consequence of our ardent age, and is it only through youth that they seem deep and shattering?" - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
"But youth has a future. The closer he came to graduation, the more his heart beat. He said to himself: “This is still not life, this is only the preparation for life.” " - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
"As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! " - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
"Why is youth so short and age so long?" - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL
"Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso
"Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”" - Patti Smith, fully Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith