Year Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,--how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.

Henry David Thoreau

I'm twelve years old. I run into a synagogue. I ask the rabbi the meaning of life. He tells me the meaning of life but he tells it to me in Hebrew. I don't understand Hebrew. Then he wants to charge me $600 for Hebrew lessons.

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.

Henry David Thoreau

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.

It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear; and you shall never find that perception again; never, I say — but perhaps years, ages, and I know not what events and worlds may lie between you and its return!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A school of art or of anything else is to be looked on as a single individual, who keeps talking to himself for a hundred years, and feels an extreme satisfaction with his own circle of favorite ideas, be they ever so silly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you like someone's work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to. Anyone who wants to be a songwriter should listen to as much folk music as they can, study the form and structure of stuff that has been around for 100 years.

As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and hunting were brought to the light of this modern day.

Henry David Thoreau

Because in the modern physics everything is weak, every proton and neutron is surrounded of weakness, of nothing. In this moment the most fantastic thing in physics is le anti-matter. Every new physician talk about anti-matter, and Dali paint, 20 years ago, le first anti-matter angels.

Only as Picasso is an anarchist, after having knifed Bouguereau half to death, he was going to give the puntilla, and finish off modern art at one blow by outuglying, alone, in a single day, the ugly that all the others combined could turn out in several years.

Puntilla: The small dagger to administer the coup de grâce to the bull.

On why he waited ten years to write about the Holocaust on his first book:

I didn't want to use the wrong words. I was afraid that words might betray it. I waited. I'm still not sure that it was the wrong move, or the right move, that is, whether to choose language or silence.

The world doesn't mind spending $400 billion every years on arms and armaments, never getting anything back from it except a chance to commit suicide.

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced.

Henry David Thoreau

... 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.

In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

Bertrand Russell

Whoever killed a person having a treaty with the Muslims, shall not smell the smell of Paradise though its smell is perceived from a distance of forty years.

I will sign a universal health-care bill into law by the end of my first term as president that will cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year.

All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.

Florence Nightingale

To attain all this [universal republicanism], however, rivers of blood must yet flow, and years of desolation pass over; yet the object is worth rivers of blood, and years of desolation.

Thomas Jefferson

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished for come.

William Shakespeare

Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security without cuts. Have to do it. Get rid of the fraud. Get rid of the waste and abuse, but save it. People have been paying it for years. And now many of these candidates want to cut it. You save it by making the United States, by making us rich again, by taking back all of the money that's being lost.

LADY STUTFIELD I adore silent men. MRS ALLONBY Oh, Ernest isn't silent. He talks the whole time. But he has got no conversation. What he talks about I don't know. I haven't listened to him for years.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!

William Shakespeare

A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it's been tested by recession and all manner of challenges — I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.
How could I not be — after all that we've achieved together? After the worst recession in 80 years, we fought our way back.