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Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.
--
as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota in Words spoken at the memorial service for S. M. Ulam (The Lodge, Los Alamos, New Mexico, May 17, 1984), published in The Mathematical Intelligencer, Volume 6, Number 4 / December, 1984

 

Stanislaw Ulam

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Beauty isn't worth thinking about; what's important is your mind. You don't want a fifty-dollar haircut on a fifty-cent head.

 

Garrison Keillor

 

What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws — all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages — are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.
What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions — a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love — the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, and a little reverence for things you cannot see.

 

Adlai Stevenson

 

When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first draft was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of your own way. Clean the kindling away, the rubbish. Make it clear.

 

Ray Bradbury

 

Be glad you're fifty — and
That you got there while things were nice,
In a world worth looking at twice.
So here's wishing you many more years,
But not all that many. Cheers!

 

Kingsley Amis

 

Ten minutes later I was in an enormous taxi-cab, an air-conditioned one, hired for the day for fifty dollars; it seems an awful lot, I know, but money's worth awfully little over there, you'd be surprised. It's because there's so much of it, you see.

 

Kyril Bonfiglioli