top of page
Exlpore more Youth quotes

"What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are disconcerted. Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no force, because he cannot speak to you and me."

"I was not a good scholar, and during my last year at school I made little effort. This was not due to laziness, but to a state of youthful day-dreaming and indifference that was only pierced when creative desire enveloped me like ether."

"We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future."

"I am life,' the girl said.'What?' he said, startled.'To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I'm life and when you're done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don't feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.'Nick said, 'I'm thirty-four and I don't feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.''It will,' she said."

"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."

"I do beseech you to direct your efforts more to preparing youth for the path and less to preparing the path for the youth."
Explore more quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years."

"I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams."

"I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight."

"He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand."

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."

"She was appalled by West Egg's raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

"My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

"No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there."
bottom of page