Ambrose Bierce Quotes on Youth (12 Quotes)

Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.

Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

YOUTH, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.

MAIDEN, n. A young person of the unfair sex. The maiden is not altogether unpleasing to the eye, nor (without her piano and her views) insupportable to the ear, though beaten out of the field by the canary which, also, is more portable.

ENTHUSIASM, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience. Byron, who recovered long enough to call it 'entuzy-muzy,' had a relapse, which carried him off to Missolonghi.

HATCHET, n. A young axe, known among Indians as a Thomashawk.

ZEAL, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

YESTERDAY, n. The infancy of youth, the youth of manhood, the entire past of age.

PICKANINNY, n. The young of the 'Procyanthropos', or 'Americanus dominans'. It is small, black and charged with political fatalities.

MAMMALIA, n.pl. A family of vertebrate animals whose females in a state of nature suckle their young, but when civilized and enlightened put them out to nurse, or use the bottle.

Childhood: the period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

ARTLESSNESS, n. A certain engaging quality to which women attain by long study and severe practice upon the admiring male, who is pleased to fancy it resembles the candid simplicity of his young.