youth (n.) is a blessing to enjoy while you have it and not to wish back when it is gone — or young men should wish their childhood back.

Marcus Tullius Cicero on Youth

Become More Precious When They End

Catch Light

Disappear

Exist To Be Lost

Fade

Feel Like Yesterday

Pretend To Be Permanent

Seem Permanent Until They Aren’t

Slip Away

youth

parenting

iphone

juvenile delinquency

person

collective noun

phobia

parent

trivia

exercise

health

growing old

exercising

working out

middle age

getting old

adulthood

optimism

pessimism

generation

generation gap

flexibility

inflexibility

Boomer

societal change

40 (age)

40s (age)

childhood

teenager

juvenile delinquent

making a mistake

old age

Youth is the time when hearts are large. Herman Melville

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.

disease

is a blessing to enjoy while you have it and not to wish back when it is gone — or young men should wish their childhood back.

Recast in definition form from: “In fine, enjoy that blessing when you have it; when it is gone, don’t wish it back — unless we are to think that young men should wish their childhood back, and those somewhat older their youth!”

has many more chances of death than old age: the young catch diseases more easily, their illnesses are more serious, their treatment more severe.

Recast in definition form from: “Nay, that time of life has many more chances of death than ours, Young men more easily contract diseases; their illnesses are more serious; their treatment has to be more severe.”

in a speaker is a river always ready to overflow its banks; a good teacher's whole trouble is to keep it in its channel.

Recast in definition form from: “His principal trouble with me, was to restrain the luxuriancy of a juvenile imagination, always ready to overflow its banks, within its due and proper channel.”

should be refused even if a god offered it back: who, having run the full course, would be recalled from the winning-post to the starting barriers?

Recast in definition form from: “Nay, if some god should grant me to renew my childhood from my present age and once more to be crying in my cradle, I would firmly refuse; nor should I in truth be willing, after having, as it were, run the full course, to be recalled from the winning — crease to the barriers.”

ought to show excess: a vine that has spread too luxuriantly is more easily pruned than new shoots are coaxed from a defective stem — and the sap never lasts in what ripens too soon.

Recast in definition form from: “I was very far from entertaining a slight opinion of him, since I like fertility to show itself in a young man; for, as in vines, those branches which have spread too luxuriantly are more easily pruned than new shoots are produced by culture if the stem is defective; so I would wish there to be that in a youth …”

Definitions HQ