Quotes to inspire and reflect

As a result of all his education, from eveiything he hears and sees around him, the child absorbs such a lot of lies and foolish nonsense, mixed in with essential truths, that the first duty of the adolescent who wants to be a healthy man is to disgorge it all.

The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

The ripeness of adolescence is prodigal in pleasures, skittish, and in need of a bridle.

So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, / An intolerable waiting, / A longing for another place and time, / Another condition.

The old Happiness is unreturning. / Boy’s griefs are not so grievous as youth’s yearning, / Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

It [England] is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!

Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy.

It is, indeed, one of the capital tragedies of youth—and youth is the time of real tragedy—that the young are thrown mainly with adults they do not quite respect.

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams / With its illusions, aspirations, dreams!

Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal.

We were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

A riotous youth; / There’s little hope of him. / That fault his age / Will, as it grows, correct.

Young people are thoughtless as a rule.

Youth, even in its sorrows, always has a brilliancy of its own.

I go to school to youth to learn the future.

No young man believes he shalfever die.

The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes—but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.

In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind.

It is better to waste one’s youth than to do nothing with it at all.

Men whose wit has been mother of villainy once / have learned from it to be evil in all things.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite neces

There is no shame in the accidents of chance, but only in the consequence of our own misdeeds.

Violence and wrong enclose all who commit them in their meshes and do mostly recoil on him from whom they begin.

Many might go to heaven with half the labour they go to hell, if they would venture their industry the right way.

Most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend’s wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.

As a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree, so the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.

A small demerit extinguishes a long service.

If one must do a wrong, it’s best to do it / pursuing power—otherwise, let’s have virtue.

The act of evil / breeds others to follow, / young sins in its own likeness.

The great play is yet unwritten; the great novel beats with futile hands against the portals of my brain.

Those huge novels from North America are not the product of diligence; hard labour would refine and clarify them.

To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

You can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.

The only way to get anything out of a writer’s brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

I wonder now what Ernest Hemingway’s dictionary looked like, since he got along so well with dinky words that anybody can spell and truly understand.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more.

[T]he act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.

The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be “comic” about it.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

I learned that all of my manuscripts have been rejected three or four times since I last heard. It is a nice thing to know that so many people are reading my books. That is one way of getting an audience.