Admit it, it is your youth that you regret, more even than your crime; it is my youth you hate, even more than my innocence.

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.

How absurd to call youth the time of happiness–youth, the time of greatest vulnerability!

How embarrassing to be human.

It's terrible to be young. It's terrible.

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.

When I was young, the old regarded me as an outrageous young fellow, and now that I'm old the young regard me as an outrageous old fellow.

If you are not embarrassed by your past self, you have probably not grown up yet.

Youth can not know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

What is truly unbearable is that the person one recalls as part of the future should suddenly become the past.

...the salient feature of the absurd age I was at — an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich — is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.

It’s odd how one’s memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up — one’s recollections of growth itself — have to be so tragic? I still haven’t found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.

Childhood is for spoiling adulthood.

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd.