300 Sarcastic or Witty Quotes about Youth

As most of you know, I love quotes!

When I began gathering the data for a list full of quotes about youth (inspired by the “Sunscreen Speech”), I was stunned to find so many that I couldn’t possibly fit them all in one post without making everybody dizzy.

So, since there were plenty that I found to be humorous, in either the mixed sarcastic or pure witty vein, I decided to break up my original list of over 500 (!) and to simply offer this list of the sarcastic, witty ones, first.

I’ve saved the more serious—though not necessarily more truthful, or, even, useful—quotes about youth and aging for another day in the near future.

300 SARCASTIC OR WITTY QUOTES ABOUT YOUTH

1. There must be a day or two in a man’s life when he is the precise age for something important.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

2. Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead center, of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush to the net.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

3. Young men soon give and soon forget affronts;
Old age is slow in both.
- Joseph Addison

4. All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die;
And youth that’s now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
- Conrad Aiken

5. Does age poison us, or do we poison age?
- Astrid Alauda

6. In case you’re worried about what’s going to become of the younger generation, it’s going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation.
- Roger Allen

7. You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
- Woody Allen

8. To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom; and, one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
- Henri Amiel

9. Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication because youth is sweet and they are growing.
- Aristotle

10. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
- Aristotle

11. Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
- Herbert Asquith

12. We thought we were running away from the grown-ups; and, now we’re the grown-ups.
- Margaret Atwood

13. Give me chastity and continence—but not yet.
- Saint Augustine

14. Youth might be wise; we suffer less from pains than pleasures.
- Philip James Bailey

15. The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
- Lucille Ball

16. It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.
- Brigitte Bardot

17. You can only be young once. But, you can always be immature.
- Dave Barry

18. I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years. And, when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth’s gravitational pull has become since 1990.
- Dave Barry

19. Thanks to modern medical advances, such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40—sometimes more than once.
- Dave Barry

20. I care about our young people; and, I wish them great success because they are our Hope for the Future. And, some day, when my generation retires, they will have to pay us trillions of dollars in social security.
- Dave Barry

21. A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
- John Barrymore

22. Middle age is having a choice between two temptations and choosing the one that’ll get you home earlier.
- Dan Bennett

23. I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.
- Bernard Berenson

24. Zeal: n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced.
- Ambrose Bierce

25. When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But, when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Josh Billings

26. When I was 40, my doctor advised me that a man in his 40s shouldn’t play tennis. I heeded his advice carefully and could hardly wait until I reached 50 to start again.
- Hugo L. Black

27. Youth isn’t always all it’s touted to be.
- Lawana Blackwell

28. As a graduate of the Zsa Zsa Gabor School of Creative Mathematics, I honestly do not know how old I am.
- Erma Bombeck

29. Age is a prison from which we cannot escape.
- Morrow Bourne

30. We are only young once. That is all society can stand.
- Bob Bowen

31. What Youth deemed crystal,
Age finds out was dew.
- Robert Browning

32. When it comes to staying young, a mind-lift beats a face-lift any day.
- Marty Bucella

33. Agreeable surprises are the perquisites of youth.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

34. Every street has two sides, the shady side and the sunny. When two men shake hands and part, mark which of the two takes the sunny side; he will be the younger man of the two.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

35. It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

36. The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.
- Edmund Burke

37. You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.
- George Burns

38. Life is one long process of getting tired.
- Samuel Butler

39. Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty—they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.
- Martin Buxbaum

40. Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
- Truman Capote

41. Youth is, to all, the glad reason of life; but, often, only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
- Thomas Carlyle

42. Like a lot of fellows around here, I have a furniture problem: My chest has fallen into my drawers.
- Billy Casper (about golf’s Senior Tour)

43. The dead might as well try to speak to the living, as the old to the young.
- Willa Cather

44. Middle age is when your classmates are so gray and wrinkled and bald—they don’t recognize you.
- Bennett Cerf

45. Youth is something very new. Twenty years ago, no one mentioned it.
- Coco Chanel

46. Young men are apt to think themselves wise enough—as drunken men are apt to think themselves sober enough.
- Lord Chesterfield

47. No man knows he is young while he is young.
- G. K. Chesterton

48. Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.
- Maurice Chevalier

49. An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have: The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.
- Agatha Christie

50. We’ve put more effort into helping folks reach old age than into helping them enjoy it.
- Frank A. Clark

51. Middle age is the awkward period when Father Time starts catching up with Mother Nature.
- Harold Coffin

52. Grandchildren don’t make a man feel old; it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother.
- G. Norman Collie

53. The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.
- Joan Collins

54. A man is as old as he’s feeling,
A woman as old as she looks.
- Mortimer Collins

55. Youth is a period of missed opportunities.
- Cyril Connolly

56. In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.
- Salvador Dalí

57. Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and, if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.
- Leonardo da Vinci

58. Old age ain’t no place for sissies.
- Bette Davis

59. Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.
- Chili Davis

60. Middle age is youth without its levity, and age without decay.
- Daniel Defoe

61. The greatest part of mankind employ their first years to make their last miserable.
- Jean de la Bruyere

62. Old men are fond of giving good advice—to console themselves for being no longer in a position to give bad examples.
- François de la Rochefoucauld

63. When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

64. Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces.
- Michel de Montaigne

65. Youth is not the era of wisdom; let us, therefore, have due consideration.
- Antoine de Rivarol

66. It well becomes a man who is no longer young to forget that he ever was.
- Seigneur de Saint-Evremond

67. I was wrong to grow older. Pity. I was so happy as a child.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

68. Youth, what man’s age is like to be, doth show;
We may our ends, by our beginnings, know.
- John Denham

69. Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.
- Charles Dickens

70. We turn, not older with years, but newer every day.
- Emily Dickinson

71. I don’t know how you feel about old age … but, in my case, I didn’t even see it coming. It hit me from the rear.
- Phyllis Diller

72. Youth is a blunder; manhood, a struggle; old age, a regret.
- Benjamin Disraeli

73. The most aggravating thing about the younger generation is that I no longer belong to it.
- John Dryden

74. Youth should watch joys and shoot them as they fly.
- John Dryden

75. In youth, we learn; in age, we understand.
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

76. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

77. The young feel tired at the end of an action, the old at the beginning.
- T. S. Eliot

78. I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that, at a certain age, one stands still and stagnates.
- T. S. Eliot

79. The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest: You are always being asked to do more; and, you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
- T. S. Eliot

80. The years teach much which the days never knew.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

81. All diseases run into one, old age.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

82. An angelic boyhood becomes a Satanic old age.
- Erasmus

83. If youth knew; if age could.
- Henri Estienne

84. Who so neglects learning in his youth loses the past and is dead to the future.
- Euripides

85. Youth holds no society with grief.
- Euripides

86. Youth is the best time to be rich—and the best time to be poor.
- Euripides

87. Inflation is when you pay fifteen dollars for the ten-dollar haircut you used to get for five dollars when you had hair.
- Sam Ewing

88. At sixteen, I was stupid, confused, and indecisive. At twenty-five, I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing, and assertive. At forty-five, I am stupid, confused, insecure, and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?
- Jules Feiffer

89. Age does not diminish the extreme disappointment of having a scoop of ice cream fall from the cone.
- Jim Fiebig

90. Wine and youth are fire upon fire.
- Henry Fielding

91. What we sow in youth we reap in age; the seed of the thistle always produces the thistle.
- James Thomas Fields

92. What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.
- John Fischer

93. Youth disserves; middle age conserves; old age preserves.
- Martin H. Fischer

94. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.
- Henry Ford

95. Youth is not like a new garment which we can keep fresh and fair by wearing sparingly. Youth—while we have it—we must wear daily, and it will fast wear away.
- John Foster

96. Reckless youth makes rueful age.
- Benjamin Franklin

97. At 20 years of age, the will reigns; at 30, the wit; at 40, the judgment.
- Benjamin Franklin

98. I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
- Robert Frost

99. Youth is a disease from which we all recover.
- Dorothy Fulheim

100. Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.
- John W. Gardner

101. Young men wish: love, money, and health. One day, they’ll say: health, money, and love.
- Paul Géraldy

102. At times, it seems that I am living my life backward and that, at the approach of old age, my real youth will begin. My soul was born covered with wrinkles—wrinkles that my ancestors and parents most assiduously put there—and that I had the greatest trouble removing.
- Andre Gide

103. Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age.
- Andre Gide

104. Youth troubles over eternity. Age grasps at a day—and is satisfied to have even the day.
- Dame Mary Gilmore

105. You know, when I first went into the movies, Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later, he played my father. And, finally, he played my husband. If he had lived, I’m sure I would have played his mother. That’s the way it is in Hollywood: The men get younger; and, the women get older.
- Lillian Gish

106. There is still no cure for the common birthday.
- John Glenn

107. Great endowments often announce themselves in youth in the form of singularity and awkwardness.
- Goethe

108. Everyone believes, in his youth, that the world really began with him and that all merely exists for his sake.
- Goethe

109. If the world does improve on the whole—yet, youth must always begin anew and go through the stages of culture from the beginning.
- Goethe

110. Rash, inexperienced youth holds itself a chosen instrument—and allows itself unbounded license.
- Goethe

111. The destiny of any nation, at any given time, depends on the opinions of its young men under five-and-twenty.
- Goethe

112. We must be young to do great things.
- Goethe

113. Youth is, after all, just a moment; but, it is the moment—the spark—that you always carry in your heart.
- Raisa M. Gorbachev

114. I am getting to an age when I can only enjoy the last sport left: It is called hunting for your spectacles.
- Edward Grey

115. Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.
- Augustus William Hare

116. Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
- Sidney J. Harris

117. Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind you have failed.
- Jan De Hartog

118. At almost every step in life, we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

119. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy—nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
- Benjamin Haydon

120. Youth itself is a talent, a perishable talent.
- Eric Hoffer

121. There’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

122. Old age is fifteen years older than I am.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

123. Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

124. To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

125. From forty to fifty a man must move upward; or, the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry him rapidly downward.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

126. A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

127. I’ll tell ‘ya how to stay young: Hang around with older people.
- Bob Hope

128. Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.
- Bob Hope

129. Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.
- Horace

130. Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.
- Victor Hugo

131. When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable; there is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age.
- Victor Hugo

132. Ask the young. They know everything.
- Joseph Joubet

133. Age is like the newest version of a software: It has a bunch of great new features but you lost all the cool features the original version had.
- Carrie Latet

134. Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

135. The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
- Madeleine L’Engle

136. Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.
- Caryn Leschen

187. So different are the colors of life as we look forward to the future, or backward to the past, and so different the opinions and sentiments which this contrariety of appearance naturally produces, that the conversation of the old and young ends generally with contempt or pity on either side.
- Samuel Johnson

138. Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice—or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.
- Samuel Johnson

139. The passions of the young are vices in the old.
- Joseph Joubert

140. The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.
- Carl Jung

141. Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
- Donald Justice

142. Youth is the gift of nature; but, age is a work of art.
- Garson Kanin

143. I am old enough to see how little I have done in so much time—and how much I have to do in so little.
- Sheila Kaye-Smith

144. When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.
- Charles Kingsley

145. Youth had been a habit of hers for so long, that she could not part with it.
- Rudyard Kipling

146. We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair.
- Charles Lamb

147. Our youth began with tears and sighs,
With seeking what we could not find;
We sought and knew not what we sought;
We marvel, now we look behind:
Life’s more amusing than we thought.
- Andrew Lang

148. The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.
- Doug Larson

149. Age attacks when we least expect it.
- Carrie Latet

150. You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
- Timothy Leary

151. The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes; but, you don’t change at all. And, that, of course, causes great confusion.
- Doris Lessing

152. You are only young once; and, if you work it right, once is enough.
- Joe E. Lewis

153. Trouble is, kids feel they have to shock their elders, and each generation grows up into something harder to shock.
- Ben Lindsey

154. The secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

155. Age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress;
And, as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

156. How beautiful is youth!
How bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams!
Book of Beginnings, Story without End,
Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

157. Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest;
For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year’s nest!
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

158. Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

159. It is autumn, not without;
But, within me, is the cold.
Youth and spring are all about;
It is I that have grown old.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

160. The elderly don’t drive that badly; they’re just the only ones with time to do the speed limit.
- Jason Love

161. Youth condemns; maturity condones.
- Amy Lowell

162. If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
- James Russell Lowell

163. To be young is surely the best—if the most precarious—gift of life.
- James Russell Lowell

164. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt, as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear, as young as your hope, as old as your despair.
- Douglas MacArthur

165. In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage—so long are you young. When the wires are all down, and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then—and, only then—are you grown old.
- Douglas MacArthur

166. When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
- George MacDonald

167. They talk about the economy this year. Hey, my hairline is in recession, My waistline is in inflation. Altogether, I’m in a depression.
- Rick Majerus

168. Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.
- Andre Malraux

169. The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty, you have made yourself what you are; and, if it is good, it is better than your youth.
- Marya Mannes

170. Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that, in a week or two, he will feel as good as ever.
- Don Marquis

171. Like virgin parchment, capable of any inscription.
- Philip Massinger

172. It is an illusion that youth is happy—an illusion of those who have lost it. But, the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them; and, each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
- W. Somerset Maugham

173. Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.
- Andre Maurois

174. The best thing about getting old is that, all those things you couldn’t have when you were young, you no longer want.
- L. S. McCandless

175. Youth is not enough. And, love is not enough. And, success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough.
- Mignon McLaughlin

176. Spiritual sloth, or acedia, was known as The Sin of the Middle Ages. It’s the sin of my middle age, too.
- Mignon McLaughlin

177. Age is a slowing down of everything except fear.
- Mignon McLaughlin

178. As we grow older, our capacity for enjoyment shrinks—but not our appetite for it.
- Mignon McLaughlin

179. It’s hard to feel middle-aged because how can you tell how long you are going to live?
- Mignon McLaughlin

180. In youth we are plagued by desire—in later years, by the desire to feel desire.
- Mignon McLaughlin

181. There is always some specific moment when we realize our youth is gone. But, years after, we know it was much later.
- Mignon McLaughlin

182. The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
- H. L. Mencken

183. It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.
- Raymond A. Michel

184. The American ideal is youth—handsome, empty youth.
- Henry Miller

185. The idea is to die young as late as possible.
- Ashley Montagu

186. ‘Tis now the summer of your youth: Time has not cropped the roses from your cheek, though sorrow long has washed them.
- Edward Moore

187. There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.
- John Mortimer

188. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

189. The older you get, the stronger the wind gets; and, it’s always in your face.
- Jack Nicklaus

190. Sometimes age succeeds; sometimes it fails. It depends on you.
- Ravensara Noite

191. Old Time, who changes all below,
To wean men gently for the grave.
- Caroline Norton

192. When you’re a young man, Macbeth is a character part; when you’re older, it’s a straight part.
- Laurence Olivier

193. Youth does not require reasons for living; it only needs pretexts.
- Jose Ortega y Gasset

194. How different from the present man was the youth of earlier days!
- Ovid

195. How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?
- Satchel Paige

196. You know you’re getting old when all the names in your black book have “M.D.” after them.
- Arnold Palmer

197. In youth, the days are short and the years are long; in old age, the years are short and the days long.
- Nikita Ivanovich Panin

198. It takes a long time to become young.
- Pablo Picasso

199. Youth has no age.
- Pablo Picasso

200. The atrocious crime of being a young man.
- William Pitt

201. A youth of frolic; an old age of cards.
- Alexander Pope

202. When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one.
- Alexander Pope

203. We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so.
- Alexander Pope

204. Is that a birthday? ’tis, alas! too clear;
‘Tis but the funeral of the former year.
- Alexander Pope

205. Young men think old men fools; and, old men know young men to be so.
- Sir Charles Pratt

206. It seems no more than right that men should seize time by the forelock; for the rude old fellow, sooner or later, pulls all their hair out.
- George Dennison Prentice

207. There was no respect for youth when I was young; and, now that I am old, there is no respect for age. I missed it coming and going.
- John B. Priestly

208. You can’t turn back the clock,but you can wind it up again.
- Bonnie Prudden

209. Middle age: The time when you’ll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.
- Robert Quillen

210. Of a young hermit, an old devil.
- Francois Rabelais

211. The key to successful aging is to pay as little attention to it as possible.
- Judith Regan

212. The heart of youth is reached through the senses; the senses of age are reached through the heart.
- Nicolas-Edme Retif

213. When the newspapers have got nothing else to talk about, they cut loose on the young. The young are always news. If they are up to something, that’s news. If they aren’t, that’s news, too.
- Kenneth Rexroth

214. Age seldom arrives smoothly or quickly. It’s more often a succession of jerks.
- Jean Rhys

215. The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that’s the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.
- Anne Rice

216. Everything is pretty that is young.
- Samuel Richardson

217. Idle youth—enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive, I have wasted my life.
- Arthur Rimbaud

218. Adulthood is when the ghosts of childhood appear.
- Holden Rinehart

219. The last birthday that’s any good is 23.
- Andy Rooney

220. We cannot always build the future for our youth; but, we can build our youth for the future.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

221. First you forget names; then you forget faces; then you forget to pull your zipper up; then you forget to pull your zipper down.
- Leo Rosenberg

222. A man is not old as long as he is seeking something.
- Jean Rostand

223. Nobody is quite so blasé and sophisticated as a boy of nineteen who is just recovering from a baby grand passion.
- Helen Rowland

224. Age is foolish and forgetful when it underestimates youth.
- J. K. Rowling

225. Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.
- J. K. Rowling

226. There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.
- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

227. The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

228. It’s a mere moment in a man’s life between an All-Star Game and an Old-timers’ Game.
- Vin Scully

229. In a dream, you are never eighty.
- Anne Sexton

230. Deal mildly with his youth; for young hot colts, being raged, do rage the more.
- William Shakespeare

231. A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age.
- William Shakespeare

232. We have some salt of our youth in us.
- William Shakespeare

233. For, though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows; yet, youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.
- William Shakespeare

234. Youth is wasted on the young.
- George Bernard Shaw

235. Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
- George Bernard Shaw

236. It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
- George Bernard Shaw

237. Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
- George Bernard Shaw

238. Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
- George Bernard Shaw

237. All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes, of our youth.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

238. One of the best parts of growing older? You can flirt all you like since you’ve become harmless.
- Liz Smith

239. Don’t laugh at a youth for his affectation. He is only trying on one face after another to find his own.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

240. Don’t let young people tell you their aspirations. When they drop them, they will drop you.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

241. The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

242. There is more felicity on the far side of baldness than young men can possibly imagine.
- Logan Pearsall Smith

243. In childhood, be modest; in youth, temperate; in adulthood, just; and, in old age, prudent.
- Socrates

244. Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
- Robert Southey

245. The trick is growing up without growing old.
- Casey Stengel

246. For God’s sake, give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
- Robert Louis Stevenson

247. Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

248. Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
- Tom Stoppard

249. No wise man ever wished to be younger.
- Jonathan Swift

250. Every man desires to live long; but, no man would be old.
- Jonathan Swift

251. When men grow virtuous in their old age, they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.
- Jonathan Swift

252. Age considers; youth ventures.
- Rabindranath Tagore

253. Age swallows our childhood.
- Jareb Teague

254. When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange—my youth.
- Sara Teasdale

255. What unjust judges fathers are, when in regard to us they hold
That even in our boyish days we ought in conduct to be old,
Nor taste at all the very things that youth and only youth requires;
They rule us by their present wants not by their past long-lost desires.
- Terence

256. We are none of us infallible—not even the youngest of us.
- W. H. Thompson

257. Youth gets together with their materials to build a bridge to the moon or maybe a palace on earth; then, in middle age, they decide to build a woodshed with them instead.
- Henry David Thoreau

258. Shall not a man have his spring as well as the plants?
- Henry David Thoreau

259. None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
- Henry David Thoreau

260. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
- Mark Twain

261. Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
- Mark Twain

262. Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
-Mark Twain

263. When I was younger, I could remember anything—whether it had happened or not. But, my faculties are decaying now; and, soon, I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this; but, we all have to do it.
- Mark Twain

264. The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
- Mark Twain

265. Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
- Mark Twain

267. Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin; but, to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
- Samuel Ullman

268. Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve. Middle age is when you’re forced to.
- Bill Vaughn

269. It is a pity that, as one gradually gains experience, one loses one’s youth.
- Vincent van Gogh

270. I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
- Voltaire

271. What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
- Voltaire

272. In youth, we learn; in age, we understand.
- Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

273. True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
- Kurt Vonnegut

274. The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made.
- Edmund Waller

275. You’re never too old to become younger.
- Mae West

276. In a man’s middle years, there is scarcely a part of the body he would hesitate to turn over to the proper authorities.
- E. B. White

277. I fear, vastly more, a futile, incompetent old age, than I do any form of death.
- William Allen White

278. The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
- Alfred North Whitehead

279. Youth, large, lusty, loving—Youth, full of grace, force, fascination. Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?
- Walt Whitman

280. An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
- Oscar Wilde

281. To get back to my youth, I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
- Oscar Wilde

282. To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.
- Oscar Wilde

283. Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.
- Oscar Wilde

284. Those whom the gods love grow young.
- Oscar Wilde

285. In America, the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
- Oscar Wilde

286. I am not young enough to know everything.
- Oscar Wilde

287. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
- Oscar Wilde

288. Never lose sight of the fact that old age needs so little but needs that little so much.
- Margaret Willour

289. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
- Tom Wilson

290. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.
- Woodrow Wilson

291. Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with; for, when it comes in middle life, it is apt to be serious.
- P. G. Wodehouse

292. There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.
- P. G. Wodehouse

293. Young people need models, not critics.
- John Wooden

294. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!
- William Wordsworth

295. Youth is a quality, not a matter of circumstances.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

296. The first sign of maturity is the discovery that the volume knob also turns to the left.
- Jerry M. Wright

297. Inside every older person is a younger person wondering, “What happened?”
- Jennifer Yane

298. An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clasp its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
- William Butler Yeats

299. Youth is not rich in time; it may be poor;
Part with it as with money, sparing; pay
No moment but in purchase of its worth,
And what it’s worth, ask death-beds; they can tell.
- Edward Young

300. Like our shadows, our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
- Edward Young

CONCLUSION

I believe, along with many of the wise folks quoted above, that youth is a state of mind and action. Remember, your thoughts create your destiny and it’s never too late to start pursuing your dreams. Dare to be different and grow younger with me!

[Note: More sarcastic youth quotes in the comments below! : ) Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added the ones I found later while working on other quote lists.]

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