87 Inspiring Quotes About Youth

Youth is a time of boundless energy, endless possibilities, and unbridled hope. It's a stage in life when dreams are vivid, and the future is an open canvas. Often, it's through the wisdom of words that young people find guidance and inspiration to navigate this exciting yet challenging phase. Quotes have the power to encapsulate profound truths and ignite a spark of motivation. In this collection, we've gathered 87 inspiring quotes about youth from thought leaders, visionaries, and luminaries across generations. These words of wisdom aim to empower and encourage young minds to embrace their potential and shape their own destinies. Whether you’re a young person seeking direction or someone looking to inspire the youth around you, these quotes can serve as a source of inspiration and reflection.

1. “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle. She died young.” - John Webster

2. “Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” - Franz Kafka

3. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:a time to be born and a time to die,a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain,a time to search and a time to give up,a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,a time for war and a time for peace.(Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, NIV)” - Anonymous

4. “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.” - Tom Robbins

5. “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

6. “Don't laugh at a youth for his affectations; he's only trying on one face after another till he finds his own.” - Logan Pearsall Smith

7. “Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. “It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.” - Trevanian

9. “The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.” - Saki

10. “What though the radiance which was once so brightBe now for ever taken from my sight,Though nothing can bring back the hourOf splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;We will grieve not, rather findStrength in what remains behind;In the primal sympathyWhich having been must ever be;In the soothing thoughts that springOut of human suffering;In the faith that looks through death,In years that bring the philosophic mind.” - William Wordsworth

11. “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

12. “...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.” - Lynne Truss

13. “The human body is the best work of art.” - Jess C. Scott

14. “Youth to youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through.” - John Galsworthy

15. “I held a brief debate with myself as to whether I should change my ordinary attire for something smarter. At last I concluded it would be a waste of labour. "Doubtless," though I, "she is some stiff old maid ; for though the daughter of Madame Reuter, she may well number upwards of forty winters; besides, if it were otherwise, if she be both young and pretty, I am not handsome, and no dressing can make me so, therefore I'll go as I am." And off I started, cursorily glancing sideways as I passed the toilet-table, surmounted by a looking-glass: a thin irregular face I saw, with sunk, dark eyes under a large, square forehead, complexion destitute of bloom or attraction; something young, but not youthful, no object to win a lady's love, no butt for the shafts of Cupid.” - Charlotte Brontë

16. “The Little Boy and the Old ManSaid the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."Said the old man, "I do that too."The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."I do that too," laughed the little old man.Said the little boy, "I often cry."The old man nodded, "So do I."But worst of all," said the boy, "it seemsGrown-ups don't pay attention to me."And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.I know what you mean," said the little old man.” - Shel Silverstein

17. “We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.” - Erich Maria Remarque

18. “It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone.” - Charlotte Brontë

19. “Saw a little girl touch a big bug and shout, "I conquered my fear! YES!" and calmly walk away. I was inspired.” - Nathan Fillion

20. “Little girls think it's necessary to put all their business on MySpace and Facebook, and I think it's a shame...I'm all about mystery.” - Stevie Nicks

21. “Youthfulness is about how you live not when you were born.” - Karl Lagerfeld

22. “Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.” - Milan Kundera

23. “He had never before felt so self-consciously young, nor experienced such appetite, such impatience for the story to begin.” - Ian McEwan

24. “Some people were just getting on with their lives, chatting, being young. It simply wouldn't do.” - Russell Brand

25. “Spontaneity is the province of youth” - Jacqueline Carey

26. “Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.” - Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

27. “Youth is a period of missed opportunities.” - Cyril Connolly

28. “In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight.” - T.H. White

29. “I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.” - C.S. Lewis

30. “What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.” - George Bernard Shaw

31. “What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

32. “Rather than standing or speaking for children, we need to stand with children speaking for themselves. We don't need a political movement for children... [we need to] build environments and policies for our collective future.” - Sandra Meucci

33. “V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.” - Jess C. Scott

34. “I suppose it’s not a social norm, and not a manly thing to do — to feel, discuss feelings. So that’s what I’m giving the finger to. Social norms and stuff…what good are social norms, really? I think all they do is project a limited and harmful image of people. It thus impedes a broader social acceptance of what someone, or a group of people, might actually be like.” - Jess C. Scott

35. “What do you do?' she asks, holding out the vest.'What do you do?''What do you do?' she asks, her voice shaking. 'Don't ask me, please. Okay, Clay?''Why not?'She sits on the mattress after I get up. Muriel screams.'Because... I don't know,' she sighs.I look at her and don't feel anything and walk out with my vest.” - Bret Easton Ellis

36. “A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement” - Jess C. Scott

37. “Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.” - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

38. “I just wish moments weren’t so fleeting!' Isaac called to the man on the roof, 'They pass so quickly!' 'Fleeting?!' responded the tilling man, 'Moments? They pass quickly?! . . . Why, once a man is finished growing, he still has twenty years of youth. After that, he has twenty years of middle age. Then, unless misfortune strikes, nature gives him twenty thoughtful years of old age. Why do you call that quickly?' And with that, the tilling man wiped his sweaty brow and continued tilling; and the dejected Isaac continued wandering. 'Stupid fool!' Isaac muttered quietly to himself as soon as he was far enough away not to be heard.” - Roman Payne

39. “I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then--how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. A denial heralded the thrice crowing of a cock, and an insincerity was like the kiss of Judas. The adult mind can lie with untroubled conscience and a gay composure, but in those days even a small deception scoured the tongue, lashing one against the stake itself.” - Daphne du Maurier

40. “When you're young, everything carries a twin charge of novelty and infinite possibility” - Rosie Thomas

41. “Some are young people who don't know who they are, what they can be or even want to be. They are afraid, but they don't know of what. They are angry, but they don't know at whom. They are rejected and they don't know why. All they want is to be somebody. ” - Thomas S. Monson

42. “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine, one of the nation, of many nations, the smallest the same and the the largest” - Walt Whitman

43. “How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)” - Philip Larkin

44. “People forget that old women were young once, but d'you think we old women forget? In my heart, I'm still thirty.” - Megan Chance

45. “I miss those childish days of long ago, when one day was as long as twenty are now ...” - C.J. Heck

46. “Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.” - Tim Powers

47. “She was not too young to be wise, but she was too young to know that wisdom shouldn't be spoken aloud when you are happy.” - Graham Greene

48. “سماعاً بني العرب الاكرمين ... اُباة التواني حماة الذممأفيقوا فمن نام عن حقه... عراه الأذى ولواه العدمرعى الله شعباً يريد العلى... ويطلبها تحت خفق العلمإذا لم نقم قومة حرة... ونرجع عهدا طواه القدمفأين الفخار الذي ندعي... وأين الإباء وأين الكرمفتى الشعر هذا مجال قرير... فنادي الإباء ونادي الشيمونادي الشباب كبار النفوس... ونادي الشباب عماد الأممفلا أمل اليوم إلا بهم... لأن الشباب عماد الأمموقل لبني العُرب لا تيأسوا... فإن الهموم ستحُي الهمموإن المقام على الضيم عار... ولا يغسل العار إلا بدمولابد من نهضة للعلى...بها ترفع العرب ذاك العلم” - عمر حمد

49. “Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.” - Jennifer Egan

50. “I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.” - Joanne Greenberg

51. “Being sixteen forever sounded good until you really thought about it. Then it didn't seem like such a great prospect.” - Cassandra Clare

52. “Youth is a failing only tooeasily outgrown.” - Agatha Christie

53. “Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendant horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete.” - David Foster Wallace

54. “I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?” - Thomas Hardy

55. “When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree.” - Hermann Hesse

56. “Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?” - Sebastian Barry

57. “The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older.” - Haruki Murakami

58. “She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.” - Barbara Kingsolver

59. “It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one'syouthful ideals.” - Paul Bourget

60. “George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life.” - Elisabeth Elliot

61. “It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age and beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.” - Haruki Murakami

62. “Lust is the best of all the deadly sins.” - Colleen Hoover

63. “Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.” - Harold Edmund Stearns

64. “The city centre was still crawling with Christmas shoppers looking to add to their already burgeoning piles of gifts. To Scott they were like ants at a picnic, teeming from store to store, trailing oversized carrier bags and infants behind them as they went. Scott felt alien in this environment; pulling up his hood he hurried through the crowds, dodging pushchairs, lit cigarettes and charity collection tins.” - R.D. Ronald

65. “the much-sought prize of eternal youthIs just arrested growth.” - Edgar Lee Masters

66. “And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.” - Lord Dunsany

67. “I can't really tell how old I am, only that I'm too young to wonder if I asked the right questions in the past, and too old to wish the future will bring me all the answers.” - Gabriel Bá

68. “Due to some dim but irresistible notion of the way things are, it is simply not possible, out of order, not apprpriate to the situation at hand, if, within the circle of those who are experienced and advanced in years, the young person declaims ethical generalities. Young people will again and again find themselves in a situation that is so irritating, astounding, and incomprehensible to them that their word falls on deaf ears, while the word of an older person is heard and has weight even though its content is no different at all. It will be a sign of maturity or immaturity whether this experience leads them to understand that what is at stake here is not the stubborn self-satisfaction of old age, or the anxious effort to keep youth in their place, but the pereservation or violation of an essential ethical law. Ethical discourse needs authorization, which youth are simply not able to bestow upon themselves, even if they speak out of the purest pathos of their ethical conviction. Ethical discourse does not merely depend on the correct content of what is said, but also on the speaker being authorized to say it. Its validity depends not only on what is said, but also on who says it.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

69. “You're never too old to be young.” - Paul Palnik

70. “It's a good sign but rare instance when, in a relationship, you find that the more you learn about the other person, the more you continue to desire them. A sturdy bond delights in that degree of youthful intrigue. Love loves its youth.” - Criss Jami

71. “Do not ridicule my effort. Everybody likes a comedian’s company. That’s why they give them tips after watching theshow, not their hard earned money for a mutual fund investment. Give him tips, not your heart. I guess youunderstand the difference.” - Ravindra Shukla

72. “What about young age? You will be miserable all through your 15 years to reach that goal of $10 million. After 50years, even if you pay a million to get back a week of your time at 35, you will never get that. Your beer will taste very different when you are at 50 from how it tasted at 30.” - Ravindra Shukla

73. “You cannot earn $10 million. Nobody earns millions. You can rob, you can steal, or you can make $10 million in an IPO, but never earn so much. So just forget all this saving and consulting bullshit.” - Ravindra Shukla

74. “If one keeps on adapting, their contribution will be limited. Theycan only imitate but never create.” - Ravindra Shukla

75. “I damned myself for my earlier romanticism. That Croaker who had come north, so thoroughly bemused by the mysterious Lady, was another man. A stripling, filled with the foolish ignorances of youth. Yeah. Sometimes you lie to yourself just to keep going.” - Glen Cook

76. “May the magic within you shine through!” - Penny Ross

77. “He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If this should be thee, Lovel!—Lovel? yes, Lovel or Belville are just the names which youngsters are apt to assume on such occasions—on my life, I am sorry for the lad.” - Walter Scott

78. “The truth is that the fever of desire in youth is fleeting disease that intimacy promptly cure.” - Frank Harris

79. “So remember those who win the gameLose the love they sought to gainIn debitures of quality and dubious integrityTheir small-town eyes will gape at youIn dull surprise when payment dueExceeds accounts received at seventeen” - janis ian

80. “The dreams of youth. So noble. So good. And heavy dreamsthey were- made frail only by their own weight.” - James Michael Pratt

81. “But look behind you, Mary.' She nodded towards the dais. 'One of the musicians seems to be trying to attract your attention.'It was Peter. He was standing on the dais smiling across at me. My delight at seeing him was such that I could not disguise it - did not try to disguise it.” - Jennifer Paynter

82. “The challenge to which these two groups responded was the interdependence of human kind, North and South, Rich and Pool, Industrialised and Rural, in the aftermath of the Second World War. To the United World College group it called for the establishment of a new kind of school where young people of all nations and backgrounds could live and learn together at the most formative period of their adolescence and so form those ties of friendship and understanding that would last them through their lives” - Prince Charles HRH the Prince of Wales

83. “I was so tired of this ceaseless, day-to-day tug-of-war between my hormones and my head, my vanity and my virtue. I felt very much as though I were caught in the middle of some dreadful battle in which taking a side of my own would mean certain misery in either case.” - Emily Tomko

84. “So often, the discarded love of youth is desperately yearned for in maturity.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

85. “Whenever a young thing wants to be free minus serious thought, she gets pregnant and then gets married. Voilà!” - Rita Mae Brown

86. “Not pretty exactly, but gleaming with the loveliness of youth.” - Juliet Blackwell

87. “It’s hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they’re disappointed if we can’t share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There’s a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it’s not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one’s best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It’s not very easy to give up one’s ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them.” - W. Somerset Maugham