Forty Quotes - page 2

If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie. (W. Somerset Maugham)
Thirty or forty proprietors, with incomes answering to between one thousand and five thousand a year, would create a much more effectual demand for the necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries of life, than a single proprietor possessing a hundred thousand a year.
Thomas Malthus
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
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.
Robert Louis Stevenson
One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.
Henry James
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
Emil Cioran
In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets. ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
Cecil Rhodes
One of the advantages of being over forty is that one begins to learn the difference between knowing and realising.
Gustav Holst
Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. "The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage.
Scott Lynch
I am resolved to grow fat, and look young till forty. (John Dryden)
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
Willa Cather
After forty a woman has to choose between losing her figure or her face. My advice is to keep your face, and stay sitting down.
Barbara Cartland
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
Anita Brookner
It takes only one man to make an artist, but forty to make an Academician.
Aubrey Beardsley
It is not part of the functions of the national government to find employment for people - and if we were to appropriate a hundred millions for this purpose, we should be taxing forty millions of people to keep a few thousand employed.
James A. Garfield
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
My dear fellow citizens, For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.
Václav Havel
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
Jane Austen
I used to try to run five miles every other day, which I worked up to and I was doing it, but I was subjected to my own thoughts for forty minutes without any sensory input, and I couldn't stand what I thought.
Peter Steele
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at forty) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
Virginia Woolf
I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our Bartlett's.
Rod Serling
So fully am I impressed with the vast importance and necessity of attaining what will be the object of my motion this night, that if, during the almost forty years that I have had the honour of a seat in parliament, I had been so fortunate as to accomplish that, and that only, I should think I had done enough, and could retire from public life with comfort, and the conscious satisfaction, that I had done my duty.
Charles James Fox
The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising There are forty feeding like one.
William Wordsworth