Top 100 Forty Years Quotes
#1. Moses spent forty years thinking he was somebody; forty years learning he was nobody; and forty years discovering what God can do with a nobody.
Dwight L. Moody
#2. When you've been doing comedy for forty years, you really do know most of the jokes. And even if you don't know a specific joke, you can pretty much guess what it's going to be.
John Cleese
#3. Tis hard with respect to Beauty, that its possessor should not have a life enjoyment of it, but be compelled to resign it after, at the most, some forty years lease
William Makepeace Thackeray
#4. These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed.
But he is dead now and has been for more than forty years, the one who gave me his trust, the one for whom I kept these secrets.
The one who saved me ... and the one who cursed me.
Rick Yancey
#5. The paper, the stapler, the staples, the tape. It makes me sick. Physical things. Forty years of loving someone becomes staples and tape.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#6. Some amiably deranged science-fiction writer had come up with it forty years back and, like so many of his kind, given it away for free - or anyway at fifty cents a word.
Larry Niven
#7. It is true that we Russians have sent only four doctors into space in forty years of flight, but still I might have had chance to fly to Mir or International Space Station except for one fact. This is that I cannot urinate - is this the right word, Mr. Roth? - I cannot urinate on wheel of bus.
Dan Simmons
#8. After forty years of working on prevention of a wide range of common and costly psychological and behavioral problems, I am convinced we have the knowledge to achieve a healthier, happier, and more prosperous society than has ever been seen in human history.
Anthony Biglan
#9. In two novels written forty years apart, a man and a woman tell stories of their love ... Taken together they provide an unusually touching story of young love unable to prevail against an opposition whose strength was tragically buttressed by the uncertainties of a cultural divide.
Isabel Colegate
#10. The only danger about websites, you know, is people who remember something you did or said thirty or forty years ago, and bring it up against you, so you're going for a job and you don't get it.
Patrick Macnee
#11. What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.
Diane Duane
#12. I try imagining myself in forty years, but it's like trying to picture what lies beyond the universe.
Haruki Murakami
#13. The larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years.
Henry Hazlitt
#14. There's a lot of stuff like that that American's don't know and since a lot of Americans don't have a passport, I'll get a passport for them and since a lot of Americans don't know what a war looks like thirty, forty years laterand it's still doing damage.
Henry Rollins
#15. He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.
Sue Monk Kidd
#16. I've fucked more women in my almost forty years than I could count, but I have always preferred men when it comes to sex. I like to fuck and I occasionally like to be fucked.
Candi Kay
#17. Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather
#18. At almost forty years old, I assumed my career on camera was over. And I was certainly given that message by all the TV managers and news directors who passed on me when I was trying to get a job back in the business.
Mika Brzezinski
#19. Thou mayest foresee ... the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of things now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years.
Marcus Aurelius
#20. Would you do something for me? Please? Would you just picture your life for me? Thirty years from now, forty years from now? What's it look like? If it's with that guy, go. Go! I lost you once, I think I could do it again, if I thought it's what you really wanted.
Nicholas Sparks
#21. I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years ... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.
Andrew Wyeth
#22. Is it no imputation to be arraigned before this House, in which I have sat forty years, and to have my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy?
Robert Walpole
#23. We really feel the fact of our mortality after we turn forty years old.
Hideo Kojima
#24. One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old.
Ellen Gilchrist
#25. John and Jenny's planes arrived in Rome only hours apart. They had never imagined, when they walked away from each other graduation night 1960, it would be forty years and five thousand miles away before they would meet again.
Thomas Allen
#26. When she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire
William Faulkner
#27. I went to sea from the most tender age and have continued in a sea life to this day. Whoever gives himself up to this art wants to know the secrets of Nature here below. It is more than forty years that I have been thus engaged. Wherever any one has sailed, there I have sailed.
Christopher Columbus
#28. For forty years I saw myself thru John's eyes. I did not age.
Joan Didion
#29. From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice.
Thomas Jefferson
#30. Richard Russell adored his wife. After they had been married for almost forty years, he sent her a note saying, With a sense of love and gratitude that is overpowering, I can only say God bless you, idol of my heart.
Robert A. Caro
#31. Am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#32. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#33. A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man:
John Steinbeck
#34. [A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths.
Rudyard Kipling
#35. It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
#36. My ancestors wandered lost in the wilderness for forty years because even in biblical times, men would not stop to ask for directions.
Elayne Boosler
#37. But do you know what: I am convinced that we underground folk ought to be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk....
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#38. Sometimes a person can find theirself lost in the barren deserts of life. The only way out of these deserts is to stay ... positive. They can wander through them for a day or forty Years ... It's completely their choice.
Timothy Pina
#39. Grave-stones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while families last not three oaks.
Thomas Browne
#40. A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.
James Russell Lowell
#41. There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.
Walter Lord
#42. We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#43. I find a woman with brains enormously attractive and not threatening in the least. A pretty face is nice, too, but having somebody to converse with and share thoughts for thirty or forty years is very appealing to me.
Beatriz Williams
#44. Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil!
Golda Meir
#45. An actress without talent, forty years old, ate a partridge for dinner, and I felt sorry for the partridge, for it occurred to me that in its life it had been more talented, more sensible, and more honest than the actress.
Anton Chekhov
#46. Our late Leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his universal sympathy for all oppressed and his profound understanding of Jesus' revolutionary spirit of love and sacrifice, carried on his revolutionary work for forty years and brought about at last the liberation of the Chinese people.
Chiang Kai-shek
#47. It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?'
Jim Rohn
#48. At twenty years of age, the old-fashioned schooling turned me out helpless, ignorant and dissatisfied. Forty years later I encounter the product of the new schooling - still more helpless, still more ignorant, and possibly not even dissatisfied.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#49. Look,' he said, 'they are just Germans who had Communism for forty years and went backwards, and all they want now is the money to have big TV sets and holidays in Majorca like everyone else. It was an experiment and it failed.
Anna Funder
#50. Being an actor is easy, just picture someone in a room and you outside waiting for your cue to go in. Elliot Gould's been trying that for forty years.
George Burns
#51. Forty years' worth of days, and ones like those are the ones I remember most, not because I want to but because I have no choice.
Ravi Howard
#52. Most people were startled to find out there were books that preceded Game Of Thrones. I'm a case of working forty years to be an overnight success.
George R R Martin
#53. Why would you take a drug that is guaranteed to kill you in forty years? One reason, right? It's the only thing that will stop you dying tomorrow.
Sharon Moalem
#54. Look at the past - empire succeeding empire - and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?
Marcus Aurelius
#55. It's just something I'll have to live with... The possibility of getting sick. Not knowing if I'll live another two years or forty years. I keep telling myself, I could walk outside and get hit by a bus. That's the way life is. Just surviving another day comes with its own risk.
Tess Gerritsen
#56. The sky-like limpid eyes,
The circular infant's face,
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace;
The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years,
Showed only when the daylight fell
Level across the face
Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".
Ezra Pound
#57. Some forty years of experience in my field as a scholar and as a teacher have given me great confidence mixed with greater humility.
George Sarton
#59. The Synod of Bishops has existed for forty years. In that long span of time it has been for all of us a good school for introducing us to the universal dimension of the Church.
Karl Lehmann
#60. She introduced herself to me as Ray's wife. I was only mildly surprised to realize that Ray had this pleasant-looking matron for a partner, a little glassy-eyed, tagged by forty years of marriage like a dead deer on a car roof.
Keith Hollihan
#61. There were so many individual styles thirty or forty years ago.
Buddy Rich
#62. More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close.
Anders Fogh Rasmussen
#63. Jews don't camp ... The last time the Jews went camping, they spent forty years wandering in the desert.
Daniel Silva
#64. I've got an accountant who's been with me forty years. If he makes a mistake, he dies.
Don Rickles
#65. For thirty-six of the forty years between 1800 and 1840, either Jefferson or a self-described adherent of his served as president of the United States: James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and Martin Van Buren.32 (John Quincy Adams, a one-term president, was the single exception.)
Jon Meacham
#66. pleasant-enough place, as cemeteries went, and if somebody had told him that he'd be buried there, after a life of, say, a hundred forty years and much more sex and barbecue, he would have been content with the prospect.
John Sandford
#67. Forty years of emphasizing accounting-style control over things has seen American businesses do little or nothing to develop the capabilities of people. Workers have been viewed as a source of energy and cost, not as a source of ideas.
H. Thomas Johnson
#68. Stop saying drug use makes people lazy. Jimi Hendrix did a lot of drugs, even though he's been dead for forty years, he's still making new records. Suck on that, Partnership for a Drug-Free America!
Bill Maher
#69. The trees at Cloudwalk have been my friends for forty years. I'm sure if I were sawed in half, our rings would match.
Diane Von Furstenberg
#70. Decision: I refuse to achieve "success" at the expense of my life. The two - life success and genuine fulfillment - will have to go hand in hand, because I will not keep my head down for the next forty years only to look up at the end and say, "Now I can finally start living!
Richie Norton
#72. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten
not ten, but thirty or forty years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.
Ted Turner
#73. Something's still wrong
the same thing that was wrong forty years ago. A malignancy, a tumor, slowly growing in someone's heart. A conscience that's seared.
Heather Day Gilbert
#74. I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.
Sojourner Truth
#75. Moses spent forty years in the king's palace thinking that he was somebody; then he lived forty years in the wilderness finding out that without GOD he was a nobody; finally he spent forty more years discovering how a nobody with GOD can be a somebody.
Dwight L. Moody
#76. There have been more people saved in the past twenty, thirty, or forty years around the world than at any other time in recorded church history.
Michael Brown
#77. I've led this empty life for over forty years and now I can pass that heritage on and ensure that the misery will continue for at least one more generation.
Larry David
#78. Marriage is not only time: it is also, parodoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John's eyes. I did not age.
Joan Didion
#79. The Joker as sadistic chaos, the Batman as merciless order. This mirror-image theme would come to define the two characters' relationship in the comics and across all media for the next forty years.
Glen Weldon
#80. I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.
Mark Twain
#81. They are clean, dressed and coiffed neatly, and seem serene. They look and act like "normal" shoppers, gamblers, dawdlers, and visitors, but "they" are solo homeless women - mainly over forty years of age and surprisingly well educated - who blend into polite society.
Marjorie Bard
#82. It took me forty years on earth To reach this sure conclusion: There is no Heaven but clarity, No Hell except confusion.
Jan Struther
#83. A lack of resources may slow you down, but don't let it make you throw away a big idea. Give God five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, twenty-five years, thirty years, forty years, or more. Give God all the time He needs to bring the resources to you!
Robert H. Schuller
#84. Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!
Errol Morris
#85. Are we going to get out of here, do you think?" "Oh, they'll have to release us sooner or later. Prisoners of war, which is how they must be classifying us, have to be released at the end of hostilities. There are international rules. I was a prisoner of war before, nearly forty years ago.
Lucy Beckett
#86. When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can't get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he's either lying or not all that bright.
Henry Rollins
#87. It took me forty years of dealing with buddhism to finally realize that actually Buddha's discovery was happiness and bliss.
Robert Thurman
#88. For forty years I have play the oboe, and still I never know what is coming out. It is a perpetual anxiety. But maybe this is good-I have never the time to get myself bored.
Marcel Tabuteau
#89. Old men are always advising young men to save money. That is bad advice. Don't save every nickel. Invest in yourself. I never saved a dollar until I was forty years old.
Henry Ford
#90. After forty years in the lab, I was asked in 1991 to become president of The Rockefeller University. Unlike a working scientist, being president for seven years provided an opportunity to interact with scientists in many different fields and broadened my scope of the natural sciences.
Torsten Wiesel
#91. I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back forty years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' they would say, 'No.
Helen Mirren
#92. Forty years later, people still swear they can hear his offstage scream.
Robert Brustein
#93. I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people's lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen.
Rachel Naomi Remen
#94. One of the first things you and your fiance need to develop is a meaningful prayer life even before the wedding. My wife, Shirley, and I did that, and the time we have spent on our knees has been the stabilizing factor throughout nearly forty years of marriage.
James Dobson
#95. I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me, nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.
Sylvia Kristel
#96. But you can't focus on things that matter if all you've been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know.
Charlie Sheen
#97. I have always been making art from an early age but for nearly forty years did computer programming to earn a living. I bought a house and put my wife and three children through college. Now that diversion is over so I can finally paint full time.
Mike Thompson
#98. I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling.
Mary Ellen Mark
#99. Now that nation called Israel, never has had any peace in forty years and she will never have any peace because there can never be any peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under His holy and righteous name.
Louis Farrakhan
#100. I heard the main reason the Israelites spent forty years wandering in the desert looking for the Promised Land was because Moses refused to ask directions.
Mary Connealy
