Forty Quotes - Page 15

• Goethe said that the worst thing in art is technical facility accompanied by triteness. Many an artist, like God, has never needed to think twice about anything. His works are the mad scene from Giselle , on ice skates: he weeps, pulls out his hair holding his wrists like Lifar and tells you what Life is, all at a gliding forty miles an hour.

  Randall Jarrell

  Art, Thinking, Hair

  "The Lost World". Book by Randall Jarrell, p. 159, 1965.

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• By no means run in debt: take thine own measure, Who cannot live on twenty pound a year, Cannot on forty.

  George Herbert

  Running, Mean, Years

  George Herbert, Edward Clarke LOWE (1867). “The Church Porch, :... [being the Introduction to the Poem Entitled “The Temple”]; with Notes; and a Selection of Latin Hymns for Sunday Use in Upper Forms, Edited by E. C. Lowe”, p.16

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• Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense. There are forty men of wit for one man of sense; and he that will carry nothing about him but gold, will be every day at a loss for want of readier change.

  Alexander Pope

  Loss, Men, Common Sense

  Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson (1812). “The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., in Verse and Prose: With a Selection of Explanatory Notes”, p.227

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• Let a gentleman be known to have been cheated of twenty pounds, and it costs him forty a-year for the remainder of his life.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Years, Gentleman, Pounds

  Walter Savage Landor (1829). “Barrow and Newton. Peleus and Thetis. The King of Ava and Rao-Gong-Fao. Photo Zavellas and his sister Kaido. Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa. The Empress Catharine and Princess Dashkoff. William Penn and Lord Peterborough. Miguel and mother. Metellus and Marius. Nicolas and Michel. Leofric and Godiva. Izaac Walton, Cotton, and William Oldways”, p.83

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• For me, I want to get across the stage to the people. I want to point at you, thirty, forty rows back, and you know I'm pointing at you, and we're having a laugh and getting it together.

  Ringo Starr

  Laughing, People, Together

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• I am not asking for government censorship or any other kind of censorship. I am asking whether a kind of censorship already exists when the news that forty million Americans receive each night is determined by a handful of men responsible only to their corporate employers and filtered through a handful of commentators who admit to their own set of biases.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Night, Men, News

  John R. Coyne, Spiro T. Agnew (1972). “The Impudent Snobs: Agnew Vs. the Intellectual Establishment”, New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House

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• It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

  Willa Cather

  Mad, Twenties, Littles

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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• The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director - now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog - and really the process is as like herding as may be.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Dog, Sheep, Cities

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• Happily, at forty-six I still feel as experimental and on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.

  Virginia Woolf

  Six, Feels, Stills

  Virginia Woolf (1990). “A moment's liberty: the shorter diary”, Vintage

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• To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Years, Views, London

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). “The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays”, p.63, Cooper Square Press

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• After forty years of close acquaintance with it, I've found that work is kind to its friends and harsh to its enemies. It pays the fellow who dislikes it his exact wages, and they're generally pretty small; but it gives the man who shines up to it all the money he wants and throws in a heap of fun and satisfaction for good measure.

  George Horace Lorimer

  Fun, Work, Men

  George Horace Lorimer (2006). “Old Gorgon Graham: More Letters from a Self-made Merchant to His Son”, p.10, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Can it be possible that all human sympathies can thrive, and all human powers be exercised, and all human joys increase, if we live with all our might with the thirty or forty people next to us, telegraphing kindly to all other people, to be sure? Can it be possible that our passion for large cities, and large parties, and large theatres, and large churches, develops no faith nor hope nor love which would not find aliment and exercise in a little "world of our own"?

  Edward Everett Hale

  Party, Passion, Exercise

  Edward Everett Hale (1899). “Works”

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• I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.

  John Dryden

  Women, Wrinkles, Twenties

  'The Maiden Queen' (1668) act 3, sc. 1

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• Pat Fox out to the forty(yard line) and grabs the sliothar(ball), I bought a dog from his father last week. Fox turns and sprints for goal, the dog ran a great race last Tuesday in Limerick. Fox to the 21 fires a shot, it goes to the left and wide......and the dog lost as well.

  Micheal O Muircheartaigh

  Dog, Father, Race

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• Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty.

  William Osler

  Art, Moving, Men

  Address at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., 22 Feb. 1905

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• Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

  Lin Yutang

  Mistake, Men, Laughing

  Lin Yutang, (2013). “Between Tears and Laughter”, p.13, Read Books Ltd

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• Has the gift of laughter been withdrawn from me? I protest that I do still, at the age of forty-seven, laugh often and loud and long. But not, I believe, so long and loud and often as in my less smiling youth. And I am proud, nowadays, of laughing, and grateful to any one who makes me laugh. That is a bad sign. I no longer take laughter as a matter of course.

  Max Beerbohm

  Laughter, Believe, Grateful

  Max Beerbohm (2015). “The Prince of Minor Writers: The Selected Essays of Max Beerbohm”, p.115, New York Review of Books

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• I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our 'Bartlett's.'

  Rod Serling

  Writing, Men, March

  Rod Serling's speech at Moorpark College in Moorpark, California, December 3, 1968.

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• So fully am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of attaining what will be the object of my motion this night, that if, during the almost forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in parliament, I had been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only, I should think I had done enough, and could retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction, that I had done my duty.

  Charles James Fox

  Night, Thinking, Years

  Charles James Fox (1815). “The speeches of the right honourable Charles James Fox, in the House of Commons”, p.659

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• In my case, that number is 45. And given that I was born on December 13, 1945 my conception, gestation, and birth all occurred within that year that number has been with me, literally, for all my life, to date. The number 45 keeps on popping up as I go about the business of getting elected you guessed it as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.

  Herman Cain

  Years, Numbers, America

  Herman Cain (2011). “This Is Herman Cain!: My Journey to the White House”, p.102, Simon and Schuster

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• Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.

  Eric Alterman

  Past, College, Years

  Eric Alterman (2008). “Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals”, p.10, Penguin

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• My sister...was an interested and zealous invalid during sixty-five years, tried all the new diseases as fast as they came out, and always enjoyed the newest one more than any that went before; my brother had accumulated forty-two brands of Christianity before he was called away.

  Mark Twain

  Brother, Years, Two

  "Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2". Edited by Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith, p. 393, 2013.

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• There's shames a man can never reason away, though he looks back and piles up reasons over them forty dozen deep. And maybe those are the shames a man never should reason away.

  Ken Kesey

  Men, Looks, Dozen

  Ken Kesey (1965). “Sometimes a great notion”

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• And they brought an Owl, and a useful Cart, And a pound of Rice, and a CranberryTart, And a hive of silvery Bees. And they brought a Pig, and some green Jack-daws, And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws, and forty Bottles of Ring-Bo-Ree, And no end of Stilton Cheese.

  Edward Lear

  Pigs, Lovely, Owl

  'The Jumblies' (1871)

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• It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Artist, Men, One Man

  "Aubrey Beardsley". Book by Robert Ross, p. 7, 2018.

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