Famous Quotes & Sayings

Walter Raleigh

... but the longest day hath its evening.

W. Somerset Maugham

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

Warren Buffett

Time is the friend of the wonderful business. It's the enemy of the lousy business. If you're in a lousy business for a long time, you're going to get a lousy result, even if you buy it cheap. If you're in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little too much going in, you're going to get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.

Vincent Van Gogh

... life is too short to do the whole.

Vincent Van Gogh

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.

Vladimir Lenin

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

Vladimir Lenin

For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom - freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin, the greatest man of action in our century and at the same time the most selfless.

Vladimir Lenin

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.

Walter Bagehot

Our law very often reminds one of those outskirts of cities where you cannot for a long time tell how the streets come to wind about in so capricious and serpent-like a manner. At last it strikes you that they grew up, house by house, on the devious tracks of the old green lanes; and if you follow on to the existing fields, you may often find the change half complete.

Walter Benjamin

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Walter Benjamin

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

Virginia Woolf

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

Virginia Woolf

The large shiny black forehead of the first whale was no more than two yards from us when it sank beneath the surface of the water, then we saw the huge blue-black bulk glide quietly under the raft right beneath our feet. It lay there for some time, dark and motionless, and we held our breath as we looked down on the gigantic curved back of a mammal a good deal longer than the raft.

Virginia Woolf

Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections.

William Blackstone

Time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.

William Blake

The ruins of time build mansions in eternity.

William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England's mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England's pleasant pastures seen?

William Blake

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

William Blake

Time is the mercy of Eternity; without Time's swiftness Which is the swiftest of all things, all were eternal torment.

Walker Percy

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.

Wallace Stevens

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time That batters against the mind, silent and proud, The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Wallace Stevens

It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

Samuel Smiles

Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

Samuel Beckett

We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.

Samuel Beckett

They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Samuel Beckett

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.

Samuel Beckett

That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.

Samuel Beckett

Yes, I dont know why, but I have never been disappointed, and I often was in the early days, without feeling at the same time, or a moment later, an undeniable relief.

Samuel Beckett

The blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them too.

Samuel Beckett

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

Samuel Beckett

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.