16 Powerful Quotes About Youth

In this post from Writers Write, your comprehensive resource, we share 16 powerful quotes about youth.

16 June is a public holiday in South Africa. It commemorates the Soweto Riots of 1976 that began after the government declared all instruction in black schools would be in Afrikaans.

Hector Pieterson, a black schoolchild, was shot by the police during a peaceful protest march. The image of the dead child was seen across the world and showed the brutality of the Apartheid regime. In the weeks that followed more than 700 people – mostly youth – were killed.

Youth Day reminds South Africans of the importance of its youth, and hopefully reminds us that the country never wants to see those days again.

16 Powerful Quotes About Youth

1. Our children are our greatest treasure. They are our future. Those who abuse them tear at the fabric of our society and weaken our nation. ~Nelson Mandela
2. 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
3. There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all. ~Jacqueline Kennedy
4. When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. ~Maya Angelou
5. When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. ~Margaret Atwood
6. Youth offers the promise of happiness, but life offers the realities of grief. ~Nicholas Sparks
7. Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exist for his sake. ~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
8. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. ~Oscar Wilde
9. The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out. ~Doris Lessing
10. The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable with interest, about thirty years after date. ~Charles Caleb Colton
11. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched. ~William Somerset Maugham
12. It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all. ~Cormac McCarthy
13. Yes, of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for? ~Julian Barnes
14. It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything. ~Arthur C. Clarke
15. I’m not young enough to know everything. ~J. M. Barrie
16. What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. ~Kurt Vonnegut

by Amanda Patterson

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to read:

1. The Top 15 Quotes About Mothers
2. The Top 12 Quotes On Writing Memoirs
3. The Top 12 Quotes about Politicians
4. Seven ‘Thank You’ Quotes
5. The Top 12 Shakespeare Quotes

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