Top 83 Tortoise Quotes
#1. I think Donald Trump and Jeb Bush are the frontrunners. It's kind of like the race between the tortoise and the bad hair.
Jay Leno
#2. Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.
J.M. Coetzee
#3. What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.
Stephen Hawking
#4. The "world" - the word always makes me think of a tortoise and elephants tirelessly supporting a gigantic disc. The elephants have no knowledge of the tortoise's role, the tortoise unable to see what the elephants are doing. And neither is the least aware of the world on their backs.
Haruki Murakami
#5. I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has. Goes to sleep all winter and doesn't eat anything more than grass as far as I know, to live all the summer. Not an interesting life perhaps, but a very peaceful one.
Agatha Christie
#6. Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise.
Mary Shelley
#7. But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations.
Alan Bradley
#8. ...It's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red lead may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. (180)
Alice Hoffman
#9. It was a race between the tortoise and the hare, but the tortoise had just enough head start, and he had the magus to drag him along.
Megan Whalen Turner
#10. Tortoise, Tortoise get bigger, bigger. Come on Tortoise grow up, puff up, shoot up! Spring up, Blow up swell up! Gorge! Guzzle! Stuff! Gulp! Put on fat, Tortoise, Put on fat! get on, Get on! Gobble food!!
Roald Dahl
#11. Good habits are the basic tools that will determine whether you are a tortoise
or hare in life!
Lucas Remmerswaal
#12. Sept.17 (1780). When we call loudly thro' the speaking-trumpet to Timothy ( the tortoise), he does not seem to regard the noise. Sept.18. Timothy eats heartily. Oct.3. No ring-ouzels seen this autumn yet. Timothy very dull.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#13. The tortoise moves very slowly, it moves towards whatever the goal is, to keep a democratic capitalistic society functioning.
Lewis Black
#14. Now I'm no biologist, but it seems to make a lot of sense that slow lives, as well as being enjoyable, are long lives. One only has to think of the example of the tortoise for proof of this theory from the animal world.
Tom Hodgkinson
#15. May this house stand until an ant drinks the ocean and a tortoise circles the world.
Jonathan Carroll
#18. The World is Very Flat, There is no doubt of that. (Night Thoughts of a tortoise suffering fom insomnia on a lawn)
E.V. Rieu
#19. A friend had told him that a man carried his pain like a tortoise carried his shell.
Anonymous
#20. The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring.
Northrop Frye
#21. One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare ...
Clement Greenberg
#22. A tortoise is, I suppose, a Jewish pet. It knows its place. Out on the lawn. It doesn't bark. It doesn't tear the Dralon.
Maureen Lipman
#23. Deathlessness should be arrived at in a ... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog.
E.B. White
#24. It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read.
Anita Brookner
#25. Many parks in Florida have information kiosks with colorful enamel signs showing the special flora and fauna in the park. The gopher tortoise, the scrub jay, the indigo snake. At no park with an indigo snake on its kiosk signs could I find an indigo.
Padgett Powell
#26. Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.
Hermann Hesse
#27. Nothing got more serious than allowing a tortoise to crawl across your kitchen floor.
J. Lynn
#28. He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery.
Stella Gibbons
#29. Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor.
Virginia Woolf
#30. Runners and yogis are alike in lots of ways, and not just because some of us need yoga to unkink what running jams. Runners and yogis are also alike because of this tortoise shell idea, this 'home' we can access inside ourselves.
Kristin Armstrong
#31. I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.
Eugene Ionesco
#32. Agatha let out a rush of air and gripped her old history textbook to her chest. Leave it to a librarian to find the book she needed, she thought, silently thanking the tortoise.
Soman Chainani
#33. I am successful because I have always been a tortoise. I did not come from a rich family. I was not smart in school. I did not finish school. I am not particularly talented. Yet, I am far richer than most people simply because I did not stop.
Robert Kiyosaki
#34. Rapidity does not always mean progress, and hurry is akin to waste. The old fable of the hare and the tortoise is just as good now, and just as true, as when it was first written.
Charles Warren Stoddard
#35. Galapagos tortoise," she said. "I'm one hundred and seven years old." "Huh. And you don't look a day over a hundred and five," I said.
James Patterson
#36. I eat like a tortoise eats, if you've ever seen a tortoise eating. Like some prehistoric swamp thing.
R.J. Palacio
#37. You do not know me,' said Tortoise. 'I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
Chinua Achebe
#38. And good luck to you, tortoise," whispered the hare, leaning in close. "And just so you know - nobody knows this, and if you tell anyone I said it, I'll deny it - but I'm not really a hare. I'm a rabbit." This wasn't true - the hare just said it to fuck with him.
B.J. Novak
#39. I took my lyre and said: come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument.
Sappho
#40. You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Terry Pratchett
#41. Nice plan. Take the gullible outsiders, walk them around for a bit, then feed them to the giant tortoise.
Ilona Andrews
#42. The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art.
Kurt Vonnegut
#43. People are eager to walk in other people's pair of shoes that does not fit them. The result is that, their dreams begin to imitate a "tortoise" walk and that I guess is already uncomfortable!
Israelmore Ayivor
#44. Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go.
Terry Pratchett
#45. In there?'
She nodded.
'You want us to go into the tortoise?'
Another nod.
'It's alive.'
Another nod.
Ilona Andrews
#46. The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It's less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so you solve it.
Carl Honore
#47. The elephant which supports the world is called Muha-pudma, and the the tortoise which supports the elephant is called Chukwa. In some of the Eastern mythologies we are told that the world stands on the backs of eight elephants, called Achtequed-jams.
E. Cobham Brewer
#48. Oh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races ... very handy.
Terry Pratchett
#49. I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad.
Henry Miller
#50. Same hour, same set-up: woman plus tortoise, tortoise plus hibiscus, man plus gin and tonic. "To arm myself against the evening."
She had found it perplexing, a man who feared the evening because he feared the night.
Cees Nooteboom
#51. When I first heard bands like Tortoise, it seemed to come off the back of that world, like let's make a record with three vibraphones and release it on a seven-inch with black-and-white artwork.
Kieran Hebden
#52. Since the well-known victory over the hare by the tortoise, the descendants of the tortoise think themselves miracles of speed.
Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach
#53. Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.
Henry David Thoreau
#54. The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.
John Major
#55. Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand.
Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation
teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience.
Terry Tempest Williams
#56. The Italians say it is not necessary to be a stag; but we ought not to be a tortoise.
Benjamin Disraeli
#57. In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.
Anita Brookner
#58. Democrats are like a big tortoise that's on its back and can't get up; you can't make jokes about that.
Lewis Black
#59. Whenever he's tried to dig out such secrets from her behind her mother's back, she has retreated like a tortoise into her child's shell. Children are quick to sense a threat. (From "Crows" by Mrinal Pande)
Keerti Ramachandra
#61. An upturned tortoise is the ninth most pathetic thing in the entire multiverse.
Terry Pratchett
#62. You'll find a man can live without his money as merrily as a tortoise without its head, or a wasp without its body." '"But
Anne Bronte
#63. If the hare makes too many missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.
Paul Kalanithi
#64. It is not easy to make our lives respectable by any course of activity. We must repeatedly withdraw into our shells of thought, like the tortoise, somewhat helplessly; yet there is more than philosophy in that.
Henry David Thoreau
#65. The sleeping tortoise takes all its limbs into its carapace. So does the yogi: going back into himself he does not see anything worldly any longer, he makes peace in himself.
B.K.S. Iyengar
#66. The developers, if they decide to move a tortoise, have to pay the long-term costs for enhancing the areas that take care of the tortoise, and it gives us the opportunity to manage an area that is going to be protected.
Gale Norton
#67. The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises.
Taiichi Ohno
#69. [My kitten] is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know you will delight in her.
William Cowper
#70. She probably fell asleep and was washed away by the tortoise waves!
-Arista
Khalia Hades
#71. He looked from His heavens and saw it was good, the toes and the crows all looked like they should. The bunny was quick, the finch bright as a daisy, the owl flew at night, and the tortoise was lazy.
Lois Greiman
#72. We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions.
Charlie Munger
#73. The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#74. A gigantic tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell was glittering near the window.
J.K. Rowling
#75. Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.
Josephine Winslow Johnson
#76. In a recent interview, Jeb Bush revealed that his brother George gave him the nickname 'tortoise' because he's making slow, steady progress. Though I think the bigger story here is that compared to George, Jeb is the slow one.
Jimmy Fallon
#77. Slow and steady wins the race. 'The hare and the tortoise
Robert Lloyd
#78. We live in a culture full of hares; but the tortoise always wins.
Dave Ramsey
#79. I'm a rat,' Robert said. 'I'm not going into a reptile's mouth.'
Oh boy. Fine time to develop phobias
Ilona Andrews
#80. You must really want to win with all of your heart! Plan your race; do not ever get side tracked. Focus on your goal - "the finishing line"!
Lucas Remmerswaal
#81. Human beings can learn valuable lessons in conservation of necessary personal resources for accomplishing the fundamental tenants of life by observing a judiciously paced turtle determinedly and stealthily traversing the world.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#82. Warren Buffett is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles which outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you.
Lucas Remmerswaal
#83. I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life.
Warren Buffett
