Twenties quotes
873 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside twenties — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!"
"The real student is studying, learning, inquiring, exploring, not just until he is twenty or twenty-five, but throughout life."
"What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification."
"I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime."
"I make it a rule always to believe compliments implicitly for five minutes, and to simmer gently for twenty more."
"The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions."
"You make me chuckle when you say that you are no longer young, that you have turned twenty-four. A man is or may be young to after sixty, and not old before eighty."
"Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes"
"Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above."
"I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly."
"[To lose twenty pounds] is not even about how much I lose and how fast, it's so much about being healthy."
"Twenty years ago, you'd see guys busting rackets in locker rooms. Today they do it in their hotel rooms."
"Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from taking flight."
"When I was 21 I think I thought I was 31. I was always kind of doing the right thing, and it wasn't until my late twenties that I became just a completely wild asshole. So I should've had that out of my system already and I was too busy being a grown-up."
"My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying."
"A man has more character in his face at forty than at twenty - he has suffered longer."
"I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not."
"In the theatre, words are eighty to eighty-five percent of the importance of what is happening to you for your comprehension. In film, words are about twenty percent. It's a different figure, but it's almost an opposite ratio. For the words are only a little bit of embroidery, a little bit of lacework."
"No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon."
"Because the twentieth century was a century of violence, let us make the twenty-first a century of dialogue."
