Youth
Smedley was born in Waverly, Illinois, a city twenty miles southwest of Springfield. He remained in Illinois most of his youth. After high school, he taught schools in the countryside before enrolling at Illinois Wesleyan University at Bloomington, Illinois. After his graduation in 1903, he started working at the local YMCA.
Read more about this topic: Ralph C. Smedley
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.”
—Policy statement, 1944, of the Youth League of the African National Congress. pt. 2, ch. 4, Fatima Meer, Higher than Hope (1988)