Yquotes.com

 

No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives.
--
Vol I; The Birth of Britain

 

Winston Churchill

» Winston Churchill - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

But do you mean to tell me that the man who in the full flush of youthful vigour, a young man of four and twenty, married a woman much his senior, and remained faithful to her for six and twenty years, at fifty years of age when the passions are dying married for lust and sexual passion? Not thus are men's lives to be judged. And you look at the women whom he married, you will find that by every one of them an alliance was made for his people, or something was gained for his followers, or the woman was in sore need of protection.

 

Holy Prophet Muhammad

 

This has been a long personal endeavor of mine. Twenty-five years ago ... I just fell in love with brains. ... I decided to dedicate my life to it. It has been a long road, it's up and down, it's actually not an easy thing to do, to say I'm going to work on large-scale theories of brain function. It was not something you could do in the 1980s. There was no place you could go. ... Nobody was doing the large-scale theory. That's changed in only recent years and I started my institute, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, to create a place where you could focus on this problem. And, I think, that's really all it took.

 

Jeff Hawkins

 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people’s time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty.

 

Charles Lamb

 

Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

 

Vaclav Havel

 

Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.

 

Aldous Huxley