Teenager quotes
1.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers."
"Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication."
"Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles."
"When I was a teenager, I began to settle into school because I'd discovered the extracurricular activities that interested me: music and theater."
"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep."
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"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before."
"The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?"
"Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter."
"As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition, too."
"Kids who go to normal school are so teenagery, so angsty."
"I cured myself of shyness when it finally occurred to me that people didn't think about me half as much as I gave them credit for. The truth was, nobody gave a damn. Like most teenagers, I was far too self-centered. When I stopped being prisoner to what I worried was others’ opinions of me, I became more confident and free."
"At the same time, eroticism in the home requires active engagement and willful intent. It is an ongoing resistance to the message that marriage is serious, more work than play; and that passion is for teenagers and the immature. We must unpack our ambivalence about pleasure, and challenge our pervasive discomfort with sexuality, particularly in the context of family. Complaining of sexual boredom is easy and conventional. Nurturing eroticism in the home is an act of open defience."
"I still get very excited when people say they fall in love. It doesn’t matter how old you are, falling in love is a beautiful thing. And I still act like I did when I was a teenager. I get fluttery and tap dance around. I’m never afraid of making funny faces or being completely goofy."
"Snow and adolescence are the only problems that disappear if you ignore them long enough."
"If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you."
"As a teenager I went all Goth, but I wasn't mopey enough. I would pretend to be, but I'd end up making people laugh."
"For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother"
"The problem is that everybody treats teenagers like they're stupid."
"It's often been said, "Violence never solved anything." The simple truth is that when you are slammed up against the wall and the knife is at your throat, when a circle of teenagers is kicking you as you curl into a ball on the sidewalk, or when the man walks into your office building or school with a pair of guns and starts shooting, only violence, or the reasonable threat of violence, is going to save your life. In the extreme moment, only force can stop force."
"When you're a teenager, everything seems like the end of the world, and I don't think that's necessarily a silly thing. You're waking up and becoming aware that the world has problems and those problems affect you, whereas when you're young they don't seem to affect you that much even if you're aware of them. This dystopian trend picks up on that little part of your life where everything feels really extreme and it honors that part of your life and says, "Yeah. It is the end of the world. Look at it.""
"Remember, what you say comes back to you."
"When you're a teenager, you want to meet a lot of girls - you want to get the most girls. You don't know anything about respect; you don't know anything about being faithful and loyal to your girlfriend."
"Even a fool learns something once it hits him."
"Every teenager deals in his or her own sexuality and has to face it and figure out how it can coincide with the rest of their lives in a healthy manner. And try to navigate it in our modern society, which is wrought with stigma and taboo and repression, and sort of as a result, these inner monsters that some teenagers really struggle with."
"We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence."
