“I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

— Poul Anderson , book The Boat of a Million Years

Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 19 “Thule”, Section 14 (p. 441)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units;…" by Poul Anderson?

Poul Anderson 140

American science fiction and fantasy writer 1926–2001

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

David Malter to his son, Reuven (p. 217)
The Chosen (1967)

“Time is not the great teacher. Experience is. A man may live a whole life, but if he never leaves his home to experience that life, he dies knowing nothing. A mere child who has suffered and lived can be the wiser of the two.”

Lynsay Sands Canadian writer

Source: Love Bites

“I can't explain this. I don't know what would make a young man at 21 get so sick and twisted to kill nine people in a church; this is beyond my understanding… There are real people out there who are organized to kill people in religion and based on race. But it's 2015 there are people out there looking for Christians to kill them. So this is a mean time we live in.”

Lindsey Graham (1955) United States Senator from South Carolina

As quoted in "Lindsey Graham Says SC Church Shooting Suspect Dylann Roof Was His Niece's Classmate" http://abcnews.go.com/US/lindsey-graham-sc-church-shooting-suspect-dylann-roof/story?id=31877465 (18 June 2015), by Ali Dukakis, ABC News
2010s

“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 (1894–1963) English writer

The Shortcut: 20 Stories To Get You From Here To There (2006) by Kevin A Fabiano, p. 179

“Love is not love at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has so died.”

Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) Chinese playwright

Preface to Mudan Ting dated 1598; in The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. ix
Context: Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. Love is not love at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has so died. And must the love that comes in dream necessarily be unreal? For there is no lack of dream lovers in this world.

“Nothing—so it seems to me…is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. … The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of—of things longer.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

"The Passing of the Third Floor Back" (1908).

“I, who have so much and so universally adored this [greek], "excellent mediocrity," 32 of ancient times, and who have concluded the most moderate measure the most perfect, shall I pretend to an unreasonable and prodigious old age?”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13. Of Experience
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”

Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986) American journalist

"Purely Personal Prejudices" http://books.google.com/books?id=DLcEAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Nobody+can+be+so+amusingly+arrogant+as+a+young+man+who+has+just+discovered+an+old+idea+and+thinks+it+is+his+own%22&pg=PA227#v=onepage
Strictly Personal (1953)

“Many a man, who has gone but a few miles from home, understands human nature better, detects motives and weighs character more sagaciously, than another who has travelled over the known world, and made a name by his reports of different countries. It is force of thought which measures intellectual, and so it is force of principle which measures moral greatness.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Self-Culture (1838)

“[The account of a man who sells his shadow is] in actual fact the life story of a persecution complex, that is to say, the paranoid narration of a man who through one event or another is suddenly made aware of his infinite smallness and at the same time finds the means by which to deceive the world in general, concerning this discovery.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

in a letter to Gustav Schiefler, 27 June, 1919; as quoted by Paul Rabe, in Illustrated Books and Periodicals in German Expressionist Prints and Drawings; The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Vol. 1.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1989, p. 119
for Kirchner the Schlemihl illustrations he made for Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte ('The wondrous story of Peter Schlemihl') were a release from his existential anxieties
1916 - 1919

“I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Poul Anderson 140

Related quotes

Related topics