Quotes about youth and age

Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune

All children, except one, grow up.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
To have a thankless child!

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,
They kill us for their sport.

The Child is Father of the Man

Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

The vivacity which increases in old age is not far removed from folly.

Old fools are more foolish than young fools.

The maturity of man—that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.

When a man is old he must do more than when he was young.

We treat the aged with consideration, as we treat children.

Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.” Right.... Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.

BODY-SNATCHER, n. A robber of grave-worms. One who supplies the young physicians with that with which the old physicians have supplied the undertaker. The hyena.

CANNIBAL, n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

ENTHUSIASM, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience. Byron, who recovered long enough to call it “entuzy-muzy,” had a relapse, which carried him off—to Missolonghi.

PICKANINNY, n. The young of the Procyanthropos, or Americanus dominans. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.

YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

Youth changes its tastes by the warmth of its blood, age retains its tastes by habit.

What makes us like new studies is not so much the weariness we have of the old or the wish for change as the desire to be admired by those who know more than ourselves, and the hope of advantage over those who know less.

The usual education of young people is to inspire them with a second self-love.

The heat of youth is not more opposed to safety than the coldness of age.

Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.

In the old age of love as in life we still survive for the evils, though no longer for the pleasures.

Age is a tyrant who forbids at the penalty of life all the pleasures of youth.

Young men entering life should be either shy or bold; a solemn and sedate manner usually degenerates into impertinence.

But how is a young man to come of himself to see blame in things which every one is busy with, which every one approves and promotes? Why should he not follow his natural bent and go in the same direction as they?

Whoso is content with pure experience and acts upon it has enough of truth. The growing child is wise in this sense.

Error is quite right as long as we are young, but we must not carry it on with us into our old age.

When intelligent and sensible people despise knowledge in their old age, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.

Some one asked Timon about the education of his children. ‘Let them,’ he said, ‘be instructed in that which they will never understand.’

The most foolish of all errors is for clever young men to believe that they forfeit their originality in recognising a truth which has already been recognised by others.

The importunity of young dilettanti must be borne with good-will; for as they grow old they become the truest worshippers of Art and the Master.

No one can live much with children without finding that they always react to any outward influence upon them.

That is why children’s lives are a series of refined judgments, not to say prejudices; and to efface a rapid but partial perception in order to make way for a more general one, time is necessary. To bear this in mind is one of the teacher’s greatest duties.

Our passions are, in truth, like the phoenix. When the old one burns away, the new one rises out of its ashes at once.

A burnt child dreads the fire; an old man who has often been singed is afraid of warming himself.

When the old clipped money was called in for a new coinage in King William’s time, to prevent the like for the future, they stamped on the edges of the crown pieces these words, et decus et tutamen. That is exactly the case of good breeding.

The Duc de Sully observes very justly, in his Memoirs, that nothing contributed more to his rise, than that prudent economy which he had observed from his youth, and by which he had always a sum of money beforehand, in case of emergencies.