Youthful Insight Quotes

If you think about 2Pac, Biggie, and Nas, all of those guys were teenagers or in their early 20s when they got started. Everybody acts like young people have to be silly and lack perspective. Those guys had incredible perspective, and everything that they said was before 25 years old.

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

When an old and distinguished person speaks to you, listen to him carefully and with respect — but do not believe him. Never put your trust into anything but your own intellect. Your elder, no matter whether he has gray hair or has lost his hair, no matter whether he is a Nobel laureate — may be wrong. The world progresses, year by year, century by century, as the members of the younger generation find out what was wrong among the things that their elders said. So you must always be skeptical — always think for yourself.

I think that life has a secret, and children they hold that secret. Maybe it's not given to everybody to discover this thing.

I was facing life for the first time. I was 12 years old, but I felt like a 20 year old. I knew then what life was.

I have a lot of growing up to do. I realized that the other day inside my fort.

I'm a very political person, and I think things through clearly, even when I was 18 years old.

The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble ourselves, we would learn not from the grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children.

The knowingness of little girls, is hidden underneath their curls.

So wise so young, they say, do never live long.

The Sermon on the Mount...went straight to my heart. I compared it with the Gita. My young mind tried to unify the teaching of the Gita, the 'Light of Asia' and the Sermon on the Mount. That renunciation was the highest form of religion appealed to me greatly.

I think I was the only kid on the block who knew about furniture scale by the time I was 8.

It is not hoary hairs that bring wisdom; some have an old head on young shoulders.

It is among children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for your healing and true wisdom for your teaching.

I write for children because I am interested in fantasy and the possibilities for experience of all kinds before the time of compromise. I believe that children are far more perceptive and wise than American books give them credit for being.

Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom.

I have never learned anything except from people younger than myself.

I met a genius on the train today about 6 years old, he sat beside me and as the train ran down along the coast we came to the ocean and then he looked at me and said, it’s not pretty.

No one ever asks a kid for her opinion, but it seems to me that growing up means you stop hoping for the best, and start expecting the worst.

All of us, at some moment, have had a vision of our existence as something unique, untransferable and very precious. This revelation almost always takes place during adolescence.

The human child – so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

When I write for teens, I feel I can cut through everything and get to the bare bones. I can get straight into the emotional world of the character.

As a kid, I often figured it was good to be patient to a fault.

When I was younger, I was full of smart things to say about all my books.