"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
— Herbert Hoover

"Youth is wasted on the young."
— Oscar Wilde

"We'll never be as young as we are tonight."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)

"When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young."
— Maya Angelou

"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
— Franz Kafka

"Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. "
— Rick Riordan

"A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?"
— George Washington

"At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since."
— Salvador Dali

"What a weary time those years were -- to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability."
— Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye: A Novel)

"I’ve met a man and fallen in love with him. I allowed myself to fall in love for one simple reason: I’m not expecting anything to come of it. I know that, in three months’ time, I’ll be far away and he’ll be just a memory, but I couldn’t stand living without love any longer; I had reached my limit…
Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meeting are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate, though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes directions."
— Paulo Coelho (Eleven Minutes: A Novel)

"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
— Milan Kundera

"Why do you want to be on The Real World?
-Because I want everyone to witness my youth

Why?
-Isn't it gorgeous?"
— Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)

"His name is Marcus: he is four and a half and possesses that deep gravity and seriousness that only small children and mountain gorillas have ever been able to master."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely."
— Ogden Nash

"So wise so young, they say, do never live long."
— William Shakespeare (The Tragedy of King Richard III)

"The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos."
— Edgar Allan Poe (Ligeia)

"He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they convey that confidence of youth I no longer possess, especially in front of a camera."
— Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth)

"Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

"You young people never say anything. And us old folks don't know how to stop talking."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

"That's the trouble with you young people. You think because you ain't been here long, you know everything. In my life I already forgot more than you ever know."
— Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)

"It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"The beauty of collaboration between older and younger generations is that we combine strength with wisdom—a surefire way to accomplish more for the glory of God."
— Alex and Brett Harris

"But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
- Tithonus"
— Alfred Lord Tennyson

"I shot through my twenties like a luminous thread through a dark needle, blazing toward my destination: Nowhere."
— Carrie Fisher (Postcards from the Edge)

"In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature and Selected Essays)

"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate."
— Isaac Asimov (I, Asimov: A Memoir)

"I covet truth; beauty is unripe childhood's cheat; I leave it behind with the games of youth."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (Emerson's Prose and Poetry)

"You are as young as you feel. If you begin to feel the warmth of your soul, there will be a youthfulness in you that no one will be able to take away from you."
— John O'Donohue (Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom)

"Zizi was young and often confused about how to live his life, and when he made a choice he clung to it with fierce resolve, as if to beat his uncertainty into submission."
— Candace Bushnell (Trading Up)

"The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"Write to Please Yourself.
When You write to Please Others
You end up Pleasing No one."
— Benjamin Franklin

"When you’re growing up, it takes a long time for you to realize that there’s something different about you. On one level, you know there’s something strange, but on another, yourself is the only thing you ever knew."
— Brooke Stevens (The Circus of the Earth and the Air)

"We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success."
— John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids)

"In der Jugend sind wir Männer, im Alter Kinder."
— Babba Quamma

"Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it."
— Charlotte Brontë

"The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage."
— Kim Stanley Robinson (Green Mars)

"Einige Junge unter euch suchen das Vergnügen, als sei es alles, und sie werden getadelt und verurteilt. - Ich würde sie weder tadeln noch verurteilen. Ich würde sie suchen lassen."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken."
— Thomas Merton

"One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know you cannot possibly do the things you are doing."
— Gene Brown

"For {she} had adopted the standard of the young: what there was in the moment was everything. And moments followed one another without necessarily belonging to one another."
— D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterley's Lover)