youth

It was Daisuke's conviction that all morality traced its origins to social realities. He believed there could be no greater confusion of cause and effect than to attempt to conform social reality to a rigidly predetermined notion of morality. Accordingly, he found the ethical education conducted by lecture in Japanese schools utterly meaningless. In the schools, students were either instructed in the old morality or crammed with a morality suited to the average European. For an unfortunate people beset by the fierce appetites of life, this amounted to nothing more than vain, empty talk. When the recipients of this education saw society before their eyes, they would recall those lectures and burst out laughing. Or else they would feel that they had been made fools of. In Daisuke's case it was not just school; he had received the most rigorous and least functional education from his father. Thanks to this, he had at one time experienced acute anguish stemming from contradictions. Daisuke even felt bitter over it.

It was a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it's true. It's too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when were too young to handle it.

Do you know that when one who has influence with youth- be he teacher, leader or parent- seriously weakens the foundations upon which a young person has built, by faith-destroying challenges the youngster is not yet equipped to meet, he fashions a disciple who has been effectively cut loose from fundamentals at a time when he needs most to rely on them? The challenger may himself be a moral, educated, well-meaning person of integrity, doing what he does in the name of honesty and truth. His own character may have been formed in an atmosphere of faith and conviction which, through his influence, he may now help to destroy in his young follower. "Disenchanted" himself in his mature years, he turns his powers on an immature mind and leaves it ready prey for nostrums and superstitions and behavior he himself would disdain.

My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined as, "one who attacks cherished beliefs as shames." What if the cherished beliefs that are attacked along the way are true? What if they are the very beliefs that make these boys and girls worthwhile, promising people they are? What if the foundations of their faith are effectively shaken at this crucial period, and they dangle, with no substantial footings to stand on?

Youths are passed through schools that don__ teach. Then forced to search for jobs that don__ exist and finally left stranded to stare at the glamorous lives advertised around them.

Children are notoriously curious about everything, everything except... the things people want them to know. It then remains for us to refrain from forcing any kind of knowledge upon them, and they will be curious about everything.

Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers_, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.

I'm a Prince of Wales Trust ambassador, so I'm all about giving youth an education, a voice and a chance to not take the wrong road.

Teachers are the one and only people who save nations.

A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?

No one else knows exactly what the future holds for you, no one else knows what obstacles you've overcome to be where you are, so don't expect others to feel as passionate about your dreams as you do.

The more risk you can take upfront in life, the better off you will be later.

Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

That__ the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

The Creator favors the man who loves over the man who hates. If you teach hatred to your children, one day your child will have that hatred reflected back onto them, or onto you.

Enjoy without injury, live without loss.

When I was eighteen or twenty, I knew everything except what I wanted. I knew all about people, and poetry, and love, and music, and politics, and baseball, and history, and I played pretty good jazz piano. And then I went traveling, because I felt that I might have missed something and it would be a good idea to learn it before I got my master's degree. (...) And the older I grew, and the farther I traveled, the younger I grew and the less I knew. I could feel it happening to me. I could actually walk down a dirty street and feel all my wisdom slipping away from me, all the things I wrote term papers about.