Youth

“Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself, still hot and savage even in its pangs of conscience: how angry it is with itself now, how impatiently it rends itself, how it takes revenge for its long self-delusion, as if it had blinded itself deliberately! During this transition one punishes oneself by distrusting one’s feelings; one tortures one’s enthusiasms with doubts, indeed one feels that even a good conscience is a danger, as though a good conscience were a screening of oneself and a sign that one’s subtler honesty had grown weary; and above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against ‘youth’. A decade later: and one grasps that all this too – was still youth!”

– Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’