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Quotes

Rejoice, young man, while you are young, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Follow the inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

—Book of Ecclesiastes, c. 200 BC

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.

—Quentin Crisp, 1968

I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old.

—Groucho Marx, 1959

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

—Bessie Smith, 1926

Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.

—Herbert Hoover, 1936

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.

—Donald Barthelme, 1964

Childhood has no forebodings—but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

—George Eliot, 1860

No one’s serious at seventeen.

—Arthur Rimbaud, 1870

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.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, c. 1940

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.

—Mark Twain, 1876

Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.

—Jean de La Bruyère, 1688

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

—Jean Cocteau, 1947

No wise man ever wished to be younger.

—Jonathan Swift, 1706
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