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

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

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

No time to marry, no time to settle down, I’m a young woman, and ain’t done runnin’ round.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

No wise man ever wished to be younger.