Youth Is Wasted On The Young Quotes

I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young. ~ Jeff Lindsay

This is one of those moments when I wish I could be young forever. Not just stop time for a second, but for an eternity.

The old paradox that youth is wasted on the young is not true for us. Neither I nor my friends take our youth for granted.

In fact, all of the young people I know are all too aware that someday soon time and gravity won't be on their side anymore.

And there's nothing we can do about it. So the young do the only thing they can do. They live and they love and they dance and they sing, they dream and they scheme, they ponder and they plan.

Like there's no tomorrow. For tomorrow brings us one day closer to the inevitable and one day further from the impossible.

And being young is all about achieving the impossible. Or at least believing you can. The old mistake our denial for ignorance, our immaturity for irresponsibility.

We understand the rules of life, we just don't want to play by them.

Not yet.

Not today.

Not tonight.

Because tonight is a good night to be young and alive. ~ A.J. Compton

Too bad that youth is wasted on the young. ~ Mark Twain

Youth is wasted on the young. If it was me, you can be sure I wouldn't be lazing around thinking I had the right woman. I'd make damn sure and then do whatever it took to make sure she thought the same, too. ~ Avery Flynn

Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion. ~ Anthony Marra

My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envied them their indifference. Perhaps there is an argument that says Cup Final tickets are wasted on the fans, in the way that youth is wasted on the young; these men, who knew just enough about football to get them through the afternoon, actively enjoyed the occasion, its drama and its noise and its momentum, whereas I hated every minute of it, as I hated every Cup Final involving Arsenal. ~ Nick Hornby

Adam took Ellie's hand and brought it to his lips, his eyes closing as he pressed his mouth to her skin. When he opened them I saw tears shimmering there, and felt my throat close up. I watched Ellie's breath catch as he tugged on her hand and pulled her into the kitchen with him to face Braden. All of sudden Adam looked a little sick. "I need to tell you something."

Braden crossed his arms over his chest, frowning as he took in the two of them standing close together. "Go on."

Adam closed his eyes briefly and then when he opened them I saw determination that I admired in the face of his bulldozer of a friend. "You're like a brother. I would never do anything to hurt you. And I know I haven't been what a brother would consider good material for his wee sister, but I love Ellie, Braden. I have for a long time now and I can't not be with her. I've wasted too much time as it is."

Ellie and I held our breaths as the two best friends faced off.

Braden's eyes went to Ellie, his expression not giving anything away. God, he could be an intimidating a-hole when he wanted to be. "Do you love him?"

Adam looked back at her and she squeezed his arm. With a small smile she turned to her brother. "Yes."

Braden shrugged and reached casually over to the kettle to turn it on. "About bloody time. You two were giving me a headache."

My mouth fell open along with Adam and Ellie's. Not once the entire time we'd been datin ~ Samantha Young

Two monks were once travelling together down a wet and muddy road. The rain was torrential, making it almost impossible to walk along the path. As the two men were trudging along, a beautiful girl dressed in silk appeared. She was unable to cross the path and looked distressed.

"Let me help you", said the older monk. He picked her up and carried her over the mud. His younger male companion did not utter a word that night until they reached their lodging temple. Then after hours of restrained conversation, the younger monk exclaimed: "We monks do not touch females; it is too tempting for us and can create a bad outcome". The older monk looked into the younger monks eyes and said, "I left the girl on the road. Are you still carrying her?"

This ancient Zen story illustrates beautifully how so many of us are trapped in the habit of constantly "re-living" the past in our minds, thus dishonouring the present moment. The young monk wasted hours distressing himself with judgment, speculation, anxiety, resentment and ultimately self-perpetuated unhappiness as a direct result of not being mindful. ~ Christopher Dines

O youth! youth! you have no concerns, you possess, as it were, all the treasures of the universe, even grief is a comfort to you, even sadness suits your looks, you are self-assured and bold, you say: 'Look, I'm the only one alive!' while the very days of your life run away and vanish without a trace and without number and everything in you disappears like wax, like snow in the hear of the sun... And perhaps the entire et of your charm consists not in the possibility of doing everything, but in the possibility of thinking perhaps it consists precisely in the fact that you want only to scatter on the wind energies that you wouldn't know how to use for anything else, perhaps it consists in the fact that each one of us seriously regards himself as a spendthrift and seriously considers that he has the right to say: 'Oh, the things I could have done if only I hadn't wasted my time! ~ Ivan Turgenev

My thought is that the average adjusted boy is, if anything, more humanly wasted than the disaffected. So let us go on to discuss his stupidity, his lack of patriotism, his sexual confusion, and his lack of faith. ~ Paul Goodman

Beautiful day out there," I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. "It's autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It's exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays - wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don't mind ironing at all. There's a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I'm pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn't do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day. ~ Haruki Murakami

Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the co ~ Oscar Wilde

The key is to just focus on the spots where the love is real, because you can just drive yourself crazy focusing on the negativity, focusing on the relationships that are irreparable and just aren't going to work, trying to convince the haters that you are indeed lovable. So much of that is wasted energy. ~ Amanda Palmer

Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-basket of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market. ~ George Holyoake

And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way. ~ Angela Carter

Shit. Fallon! Shit, shit, shit, dammit, shit, shit." I hear Ben cursing like a sailor, but I don't understand why. I feel his hands meet my shoulders. "Fallon the Transient, wake the hell up!" I open my eyes and he's sitting up on the bed, running one hand through his hair. He looks pissed. I sit up on the bed and rub the sleep out of my eyes. The sleep. We fell asleep? I look over at my alarm clock and it reads 8:15. I reach over and pick it up to bring it closer to my face. That can't be right. But it is. It's 8:15. "Shit," I say. "We missed dinner," Ben says. "I know." "We slept for two hours." "Yeah. I know." "We wasted two fucking hours, Fallon." He looks genuinely distraught. Cute, but distraught. "I'm sorry. ~ Colleen Hoover

[He] seemed to possess, beneath it all, an immutable sense of self-assurance, but in addition to that, the look of a man ensnared by what he perceived to be his own Duty. A Duty that effervesced inside of him impatiently, dry at the mouth, shaking feverishly, and holding its breath in anticipation for - not his action, but in fact - the fruits of his actions, however distant these may have been. The goal was to satiate its thirst in as few moves as possible, instilling each action with an almost implied necessity for having a motive by which it must exist, which is to say that no action was to be wasted for anything, but only for that which was rooted in some definable and clear-cut purpose...Every action had to be a step in some direction and there could be no dillydallying, for Duty bubbling in the bloodstream for too long brought with it a kind of sickness...from which it was difficult to recover. Neither could there be any reconsideration, for the values to which one has sworn were unassailable and beyond the powers of one individual to reassess. And so, Duty, once instilled, must be allowed to carry on unabated, diverting sustenance away from other aspects of one's character - driving them to a weakened state, brow-beaten by circumstances beyond their immediate control and relegated to their own downtrodden acquiescence to the bravado of the Parasitic Superego, and, as such, cognizant of their growing superfluity. ~ Ashim Shanker

All that I did," she said, "everything I tried to do. All for nothing."
Nothing is done entirely for nothing, said the fox of dreams. Nothing is wasted. You are older, and you have made decisions, and you are not the fox you were yesterday. Take what you have learned, and move on. ~ Neil Gaiman

The flashing black line on an empty Word document reminds me that my life is counting down second by second, and that if I don't write I'll have wasted my time here on earth. ~ Jarod Kintz

(It starts with)
One thing, I don't know why
It doesn't even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know
time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to
Watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter ~ Linkin Park

What if, in all the eons of enternity, this was the one and only time that I would be alive. How would I live my life if that were the case? Know what I mean? What if this was all there is?"
"Well, I guess there'd be a lot of disappointed dead priests," I said.
Carl chuckled. "Well, there that," he said. "But it also means that this is our heaven. We are surrounded every day by the wonders of life, wonders beyond comprehension that we simply take for granted. I decided that day that I would live my life-not simply exist. If I died and discovered heaven on the other side, whell, that'd be just fine and dandy. But if I didn't live my life as if I was already in heave, and I died and found only nothingness, well...I would have wasted my life. I would have wasted my one chance in all of history to be alive. ~ Allen Eskens

Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime.
And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime. ~ David Levithan

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us. ~ Lauren DeStefano

Millions of dollars later, and neither of them were happy. Money is wasted on the rich. ~ Gillian Flynn

Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who has the right line.
Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together and organize our own structures and our own politcal party ...
I felt, and still feel, that it is necessary for Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle. ~ Assata Shakur

Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort. ~ Neil Gaiman

Never, ever apologize if you haven't done anything wrong. Keep your sorrys and your excuse mes and your please forgive mes, above all keep your please, please forgive mes for the one moment in life when you'll really need them, need those words. And you will be in dire need of entreaties like these, oh you will be praying for those words, blessing yourself for not having wasted them on something spurious and unworthy. You will someday be kneeling, kneeling down in front of a pair of accusing eyes, threatening feet, feet that might kick you or feet that might do something worse. At times what we should dread most are feet that will run away, that will run away and leave us everlastingly alone. Loneliness is what should terrify you most, more than a slap or a kick or hunger even. And that's when those words, please, please forgive me, will be all that separates you from the pit and swamp of the deepest despair. So don't squander them on matters of no consequence. The world is cursed because people do not apologize for theirs sins or crimes or merely their cowardice, but it's even more cursed because people apologize much too much-- they use their regrets as a way of not really probing what the have done, as permission to persevere in their blindness, absolving themselves without having atoned or understood. ~ Ariel Dorfman

In case you haven't heard, my girlfriends and I have declared the summer of 2012 as the best summer ever. The best way to document said 'best summer ever' is with a good ol' disposable camera. Smile, click, move on! Nobody gets pic approval, and there's no time wasted gathering around the camera to analyze a moment that just happened. ~ Candice Accola

And yet there's nothing to understand. The problem is that children believe what adults say and, once they're adults themselves, they exact their revenge by deceiving their own children. "Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is" is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late. The mystery remains intact, but all your available energy has long ago been wasted on stupid things. All that's left is to anesthetize yourself by trying to hide the fact that you can't find any meaning in your life, ... ~ Muriel Barbery

There are psychologists who think that consciousness accompanies brain processes and is determined by them but doesn't itself exert any influence on them. Something like the reflection of a tree in water; it couldn't exist without the tree, but it doesn't in any way affect he tree. I think it's all stuff and nonsense to say that there can be love without passion; when people say love can endure after passion is dead they're talking of something else, affection, kindliness, community of taste and interest, and habit . . . Of course there can be desire without love. Desire isn't passion. Desire is the natural consequence of the sexual instinct . . . That's why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and place are propitious . . . what is sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose . . . Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction but impediment . . . When passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive . . . and if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, th ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I feel tired to death, paralyzed by this mysteriously wasted life's stubborn concentration on hopelessness and dissolution. It occurs to me that if I lie still like this for long enough, then I'll be dead when I finally wake again, and nothing can ever again torment me, beset me, or present me with evidence of my baseness and decay. That thought is the only one that can comfort me. ~ Christer Kihlman

Does a king let his friends die for him?" Yarvi glanced guiltily across at Shadikshirram's sword, and remembered the feeling, punching, punching, the red knife in his red hand, and shivered under his stolen cloak. "Does a king stab women in the back?" The tears were still wet on Nothing's wasted face. "A good one sacrifices everything to win, and stabs whom he must however he can. The great warrior is the one who still breathes when the crows feast. The great king is the one who watches the carcasses of his enemies burn. Let Father Peace spill tears over the methods. Mother War smiles upon results." "That's what my uncle would have said." "A wise man, then, and a worthy enemy. Perhaps you will stab him in the back and we can watch him burn together. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Not Speaking has no reflection on what is being thought on the inside, being a non-verbal person with Autism in my early years I've come to value words, they shouldn't be wasted nor abused they should be cherished used positively and productively. ~ Paul Isaacs

Kyle eased back in his chair, rubbing his jaw thoughtfully. "This is an interesting situation, Jordo . . . What's it worth to you to keep this information under wraps? Because I'm going to need some income when I get out of this place, and I hear that wine business of yours is really taking off."

"Get real. You owe me."

Kyle sat up, indignant at that. "For what?"

Jordan folded her arms on the table. "Sophomore year. You took Mom's car out of the garage in the middle of the night - without a license - to drive over to Amanda Carroll's. Dad thought he heard a noise when you tried to sneak back in, so I distracted him by saying that I'd seen a strange person in the backyard. While he was looking out my bedroom window, you crept by and mouthed, 'I owe you.' Well, now I want to collect."

"That was seventeen years ago," Kyle said. "I'm pretty sure there's a statute of limitations on IOUs."

"I don't recall hearing any disclaimers, expirations, or caveats at the time."

"I was a minor. The contract's not valid."

"If you want to weasel your way out of this, I suppose that's true." Jordan waited, knowing she had him. Despite the impression one might get from the orange jumpsuit, her brother was quite honorable. And he always kept his word.

"Fine," he grumbled. "I finally get some dirt on you, Ms. Perfect, for the first time in thirty-three years, and it's wasted." He grinned. "Good thing that trip to ~ Julie James

Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.

Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit.

Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing.
...
The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution.

No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin ~ David Marusek

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. ~ George Orwell

Ellie's head sinks into her hands, and she weeps for the unknown Boot, for Jennifer, for chances missed and a life wasted. She cries for herself, because nobody will ever love her like he loved Jennifer, and because she suspects that she is spoiling what might have been a perfectly good, if ordinary, life. She cries because she is drunk and in her flat and there are few advantages to living on your own except being able to sob uninhibitedly at will. ~ Jojo Moyes

There was some expiration point to my life, and it became very important to maximize the time that I did have on Earth. That's what led me to my personal philosophy: "No Opportunity Wasted" - NOW for short, which is about living life to the fullest. ~ Phil Keoghan