Top 100 Forty Years Quotes
#1. I did a lot of good work for the rest of the forty years ... science is an incremental thing. Everything builds on everything else, it's a pattern, it's a mosaic.
Gustav Nossal
#3. Fifty is the new forty. I always thought my best work would come in the years forty to sixty, if I was fortunate enough to hang around - and it is hard to stick around.
Bruce Willis
#4. I'm a woman. Forty-five in female years (which is about a hundred and thirty in male years - bastards).
Debra Webb
#5. When it comes to breaking old habits and starting new ones, remember to be patient with yourself. If you've spent twenty, thirty, or forty years or more repeating the behaviors you're now trying to change, you've got to expect it's going to take time and effort before you see lasting results.
Darren Hardy
#6. On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. "How old is this ruin?" someone asked a guide. "Forty-two years," said Lange.
David Lange
#7. One day you gone look up and realize that you will be forty years old still calling on 'options' and the rest of us will have husbands or potential husbands and a few children.
Nat L. Johns
#8. Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.
Erica Jong
#9. Hezekiah reigned forty-two years and was one of Judah's greatest kings (2 Kings 18 - 20; 2 Chron. 29 - 32). He not only strengthened the city of Jerusalem and the nation of Judah, but led the people back to the Lord. He built the famous water system that still exists in Jerusalem.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#10. I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.
Henri Matisse
#12. We have all been guilty of complaining, but God does not look at it as lightly as we may think. Complaining was the reason the Jews ended up wandering in the desert for forty years. If we were more grateful for what God has done for us, abasing ourselves would not be a problem.
Monica Johnson
#13. Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work.
Chuck Klosterman
#14. I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
Charles Darwin
#15. It doesn't bother me," I said. "If you don't mind looking forty years old at twenty, smelling like an ashtray, and getting lung cancer, why should I?
Michelle Hodkin
#16. In order to build basic democracy here we'll need lives of two generations - at least forty years.
Aleksandr Lebed
#17. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I'll share the formula I learned while forging my way forward as a full-time painter for forty-four years. The steps all break down to one simple sentence: Make art that connects with enough folks for you to earn a splendid living.
Jack White
#18. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.
Richard Brautigan
#19. Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.
Allan Gurganus
#20. Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."
Santiago Ramon Y Cajal
#21. For forty years I have been married to one of the greatest women the world has ever produced. All I could produce - small as it may be - was love and loyalty.
Denis Thatcher
#22. But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He
Bernard Cornwell
#23. A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.
Vladimir Nabokov
#24. When Margaret and I look back over forty years of marriage, we always remember the eight we spent home-schooling as the best years of our lives.
Renny Scott
#25. It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Stendhal
#26. Forty years ago, after many years of successful use of thyroid therapy, leading gynecologists in this country and elsewhere were reporting thyroid had cured more menstrual disorders than all other medications combined. Unfortunately, that lesson seems to have been largely lost.
Broda Otto Barnes
#27. Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let's face it, frivolous - especially the visual arts, with their connotation of "the starving artist" and the mistaken concept of necessary talent
Betty Edwards
#28. Everything is old, here. We are old - the Masters."
"You're not," Irian said. She thought him between thirty and forty[ ... ]
"But I came far. Miles can be years.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#29. Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes
Herman Melville
#30. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.
Erwin Schrodinger
#31. My music is how I feel, and that's changed from being twenty years old to being forty-three years old.
Chris Robinson
#32. My wife and I have enjoyed over forty years of wedded blitz.
Hugh Leonard
#33. In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Andrzej Wajda
#34. How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died.
Virginia Woolf
#35. If you want to sustain excellence over a long time, you'd better come up with a system that works well. Anyone can sprint for a little while, but you can't sprint for forty years.
Michael Dell
#36. A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!
Cannonball Adderley
#37. I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.
Tim Daly
#38. Forty years after the greatest scandal of the American presidency, Elizabeth Drew's account in Washington Journal remains fresh and riveting, instructive and evocative. Her afterword on Nixon's post-Watergate life is equally compelling.
Tom Brokaw
#39. The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#40. He was forty years old, no more, and the color of a white napkin stained with olive oil.
Anonymous
#41. When I was about forty-three years of age, I had a private secretary with a beautiful baritone voice. I told him I would give anything in the world if I could only carry a tune. He laughed and said, 'Anybody who has a voice and perseverance can sing.'
Heber J. Grant
#42. The Most successful industry of the last forty years has been built on failure after failure after failure.
Tim Harford
#43. Forty years after a battle it is easy for a non-combatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it.
Herman Melville
#44. After forty years, with whatever authority comes from lived experience, I can say: You, too, can create something. You can nurture it and watch it grow.
Sy Safransky
#45. Christmas was over. It had passed, as usual, in a fever of generosities, and left an aftertaste of swindle in its wake. "Anticippointment" Pamela said ... and there was in that invented word all the regret and resignation that forty-seven years of Christmases had built up in her.
David Leavitt
#46. I'm shoutin' back more'n forty long years at myself, yay, ... Oy, list'n! Times are you're weak 'gainst the world! Times are you can't do nothin'! That ain't your fault, it's this busted world's fault is all! But no matter how loud I shout, ... he don't hear me nor never will.
David Mitchell
#47. Do you think I don't deserve to grieve as much as someone who lost their son after forty years? Twenty-seven years is a short time to have a son. Just because it was short, it doesn't mean it didn't happen. It was just short. That's all.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
#48. I wish I had met [Francesca] Woodman forty years ago. It would have been great to live with her for a year. She didn't save anything. She played the camera like a new guitar. She murdered herself out taking pictures ...
Richard Prince
#49. The best time to plant a tree was forty years ago. The second best time is today.
Robin S. Sharma
#50. A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about.
Newt Gingrich
#51. I mean in recent years, I think you've only got to sell thirty or forty thousand to get a #1.
Neil Innes
#52. Forty years ago my mother died," he said. "She captured by Comanches, nine years old. Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say. I love my mother.
S.C. Gwynne
#53. Population studies begun forty to fifty years ago show that when people migrate from one country to another, they acquire the cancer rate of the country to which they move, despite the fact their genes remain the same.
T. Colin Campbell
#54. Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life ...
Penelope Gilliatt
#55. I am angry nearly every day of my life, but I have learned not to show it; and I still try to hope not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do it.
Louisa May Alcott
#56. I practice my saxophone three hours a day. I'm not saying I'm particularly special, but if you do something three hours a day for forty years, you get pretty good at it.
Kenny G
#57. Don't talk to me about sense.
i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony.
Christopher Fowler
#58. Have you ever noticed how many men in the Bible failed in the second half of life? Our enemy is so cunning that he will wait forty or even fifty years to set a trap.
Joseph C. Aldrich
#59. And if I went
back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in
an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would
be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself.
Nick Hornby
#60. Those who have been outspoken in advocating human rights during these last forty years, have themselves grabbed the most fundamental of human rights from the people of the Third-World countries.
Ali Khamenei
#61. I've been a therapist for more than forty years and certainly there is a place for "wise elders" in the healing process. But most people, most of the time, can heal themselves and those they love, with the help of their family, friends, and community.
Jed Diamond
#62. Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.
Tony Visconti
#63. The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.
Aristotle.
#64. With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years.
Carl Sagan
#65. In my writers' room, which is mostly men, I get a lot of questions like "What would be the quickest way to pass as a seemingly normal guy between the ages of twenty-five and forty years old?"
Mindy Kaling
#66. Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them - with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.
Dava Sobel
#67. I am thrilled to be modelling the debut collection of Always Aliza. Janet Reger was such an iconic brand throughout my modelling career, and it feels great to now be modelling her daughter's range for JD Williams almost forty years on.
Marie Helvin
#68. With all their damned talk of modern painting, I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#69. Constantinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism; and, in a long interval of forty years, the faith of the princes and prelates who reigned in the capital of the East was rejected in the purer schools of Rome and Alexandria.
Edward Gibbon
#70. Harry and I have been sweethearts and married more than forty years - and no matter where I was, when I put out my hand Harry's was there to grasp it.
Bess Truman
#71. There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.
Allen Tate
#72. She might not do it tonight, and she might not do it with that French boy, but she was going to get laid, and soon, because she was forty-three years old and she damn well needed it.
Victoria Dahl
#73. Another interesting fact is people become more intelligent as they age, gaining about one IQ point every ten years. Against the stereotype, it's not all downhill after forty. There is hope for me
James Tagg
#74. That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.
William Kent Krueger
#75. 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs sparked a rising wave of consumer indignation. But ... it takes a major catastrophe to carry legal and enforcement action over the hump of lethargy and inaction ... Today, nearly forty years later, the situation is worse, not better.
John Fuller
#76. What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
Emil Cioran
#77. Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed - although he doesn't know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you're simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.
Jonathan Tropper
#78. I'm on this planet for another forty years at the most and I got a baby and a wife and I'm worried about their future and that kind of fear, that anger is spilling into my lyrics, I can't just sit back and talk about myself until I'm dead.
Richard Patrick
#80. We need to see men and women as equal partners, but it's hard to think of movies that do that. When I talk to people, they think of movies of forty-five years ago! Hepburn and Tracy!
Betty Friedan
#81. I'm forty-two years old - which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
Claire Messud
#82. I was staring down thirty-five in a few months. While I might have thought forty was old when I was her age, I'd since decided to move that particular goal post down the field to somewhere around sixty. And I reserved the right to make it even older if I survived the next ten years.
Marshall Thornton
#83. I am a hundred and forty six years old and this is not my first unwinnable war.
Cassandra Clare
#84. Forty-five years, these people were provided for. Not with much, you understand, but there weren't beggars in the streets or homeless people. Now everyone must figure out a new way to make a living. Selling hats or popcorn or flowers or coffee, there's not much difference. They're scared.
Annie Ward
#85. The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.
Charlie Pierce
#86. Simply by not owning three medium-sized castles in Tuscany I have saved enough money in the last forty years on insurance premiums alone to buy a medium-sized castle in Tuscany.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#87. Do you know what happened the last time a nation listened to a bush?" Honey asks.
No one says a word.
"Its people wandered in the desert for forty years.
Paul Auster
#88. We'll never know. In the summer of 1971, against the advice of his mother, Howard Myers took a vacation to Florida. The combination of the heat and his medical condition combined to give him a massive heart attack which killed him. He was forty-one years old. There
Howard L. Myers
#89. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend ... I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.
Robert Harris
#90. When your life has been spent in one war after another for forty-five years, you have to be pretty handy to survive.
David Gemmell
#91. I think we have some serious problems now, but, if you look back over the last thirty or forty years that my book deals with, I think we are in better shape now than we would have been if all of those cases had not come down.
Floyd Abrams
#92. I could stay with Mears-Starbuck for forty-seven years, I thought. I could live with a crazy girlfriend, get my left ear sliced off and maybe inherit Ferris' job when he retired.
Charles Bukowski
#93. She'd never been one to think in terms of years, anyway. A person was what they were, and many a man at forty was sixty in his ways and many another was twenty and would never grow past it.
Louis L'Amour
#94. I let my game do the talking. I've had incidents like that but when I compare my own story to the stories that have happened forty or fifty years ago particularly to Jackie Robinson for example.
Maurice Ashley
#95. Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
Paula McLain
#96. I was born October 5, 1957, on the South Side of Chicago, in the Woodlawn area, a neighborhood that hasn't changed much in forty-five years. Our house was on 66th and Blackstone, but the city tore it down when the rats took over.
Bernie Mac
#97. I have been a refugee for the last forty years in the luminous land of opportunity. Still my heart is aching with hiraeth for my native land.
Debasish Mridha
#98. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
#99. I know some good old gals in their 50s and 60s. All these women tell me, 'Forty to 50. Those are the hot times.' So far, you couldn't prove it by me. But hell, I'm only two years in.
Lauren Hutton
#100. 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
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