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 man must store up, the old man must use.

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

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.

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

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

Childhood knows what it wants—to leave childhood behind.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

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.

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.

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.

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.