
“… and within five minutes I'd lost interest.”
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Source: The Summoning
“… and within five minutes I'd lost interest.”
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
The Roycraft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams (1923)
Source: The Roycroft Dictionary Concocted by Ali Baba and the Bunch on Rainy Days
There is no indication that Einstein said this. According to Quote Investigator, the earliest publication of a quote similar was in a collection of articles about manufacturing in 1966, when an employee of the Stainless Processing Company wrote a piece titled "The Manufacturing Manager's Skills." The article attributed the quote to an unnamed professor at Yale, by saying, "If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is." (See, 1966, The Manufacturing Man and His Job by Robert E. Finley and Henry R. Ziobro, "The Manufacturing Manager's Skills" by William H. Markle (Vice President, Stainless Processing Company, Chicago, Illinois), Start Page 15, Quote Page 18, Published by American Management Association, Inc., New York. Verified on paper). https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/22/solve/
Disputed
Variant: If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.
“Never run after a man or a bus, there's always another one in five minutes.”
Source: Kiss and Tell
As quoted in Succeeding Sane : Making Room for Joy in a Crazy World (1998) by Bonnie St. John Deane, p. 122
Wall and Piece (2007)
A Heap o' Livin' (1916)
Source: A Friend's Greeting, stanza 1, p. 33.