Quotes about minute
page 10

Kathy Griffin photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“All these riches, then, of her theology the Church has acquired, one might almost say, like the British Empire, in a fit of absence of mind. She was so busy scrapping with the heretics that she wasn't conscious of saying anything she hadn't always said; and yet, when she had time to sit down and look about her, she found it took ten minutes to sing the Credo instead of three.”

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) English priest and theologian

The Hidden Stream (1952). London: Burns Oates, p. 142.
Knox alludes to John Robert Seeley's much-quoted statement in The Expansion of England (1883) that "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind".

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester photo

“But oh, how slowly minutes roll
When absent from her eyes,
That feed my love, which is my soul:
It languishes and dies.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

The Mistress: A Song, ll. 5–8.
Other

Paul Bourget photo
Woody Allen photo

“I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Attributed to Allen by Herb Caen in Reader's Digest, October 1967. For additional citations see this entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/08/speed-reading/.

J.M. Coetzee photo
Daniel Johns photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“… like us? Counting up the minutes -- have we spent half an hour together?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

Gay Talese photo
Bono photo
Arundhati Roy photo

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

John Hennigan photo
Uri Avnery photo
David Cross photo
Don Cherry photo
Mike Watt photo
Carlo Carrà photo
John Dewey photo
Mahasi Sayadaw photo
Nina Shatskaya photo
Robert Baden-Powell photo

“If a man cannot make his point to keen boys in ten minutes, he ought to be shot!”

Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941) lieutenant-general in the British Army, writer, founder and Chief Scout of the Scout Movement

The Scouter (November 1928); Reprinted in Footsteps of the Founder (1987)

Ellen Page photo
Ed Bradley photo
Rachele Brooke Smith photo
James Callaghan photo

“David Rose (ITN reporter): Industrial relations and picketing. What about the TUC putting its house in order?
James Callaghan: The media's always trying to find what's wrong with something.. Let's try and make it work.
Rose: What if the unions can't control their own militants? So there are no circumstances where you would legislate?
Callaghan: I didn't say anything of that sort at all. I'm not going to take the interview any further. Look here. We've been having five minutes on industrial relations. You said you would do prices. I'm just not going to do this.. that programme is not to go. This interview with you is only doing industrial relations. I'm not doing the interview with you on that basis. I'm not going to do it. Don't argue with me. I'm not going to do it.”

James Callaghan (1912–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom; 1976-1979

Interview (2 May 1979), quoted in Michael Pilsworth, "Balanced Broadcasting", in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1979 (Macmillan, 1980), pp. 207-208.
Callaghan objects to the line of questioning of ITN's David Rose in an interview recorded on 2 May 1979. He was eventually persuaded to return and recorded a new interview, but owing to an agreement with NBC TV that they should have access to all material recorded by ITN, it was shown in the USA and then reported in the Daily Telegraph.
Prime Minister

Arthur Schopenhauer photo
William Luther Pierce photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Howard Cosell photo

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Sonny Liston's not coming out! Sonny Liston's not coming out! He's out! The winner and new heavyweight champion of the world is Cassius Clay!”

Howard Cosell (1918–1995) American sportscaster

February 25, 1964, calling the victory of Cassius Clay (who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali) over Sonny Liston.

Gordon Lightfoot photo
John Milton photo

“When the gust hath blown his fill,
Ending on the rustling leaves
With minute drops from off the eaves.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 128

Norbert Wiener photo
John Cage photo
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen photo
Richard Burton photo
Reese Palley photo
Brian Urlacher photo

“We watched the film and everybody was saying that he just turned into the Incredible Hulk the last four minutes of the game, just killing people and running over and tackling whoever had the ball.”

Brian Urlacher (1978) All-American college football player, professional football player, linebacker

Lightning strikes twice for Urlacher, English http://www.chicagobears.com/news/NewsStory.asp?story_id=2561,
Devin Hester's commentary after Urlacher's performance against the Arizona Cardinals

Saki photo

“People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"The Innocence of Reginald"
Reginald (1904)

D.H. Lawrence photo
Henry Alford photo

“Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail; but in conveying a right impression.”

Henry Alford (1810–1871) English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 603.

Paul Weller (singer) photo

“If we get through for two minutes only it will be a start!”

Paul Weller (singer) (1958) English singer-songwriter, Guitarist

Start! (1980)

Octavio Paz photo

“time in an allegory of itself imparts to us lessons of wisdom which the moment they are formulated are immediately destroyed by the merest flickers of light or shadow which are nothing more than time in its incarnations and disincarnations which are the phrases that I am writing on this paper and that disappears as I read them:
they are not the sensations, the perceptions, the mental images, and the thoughts which flare up and die away here, now, as I write or as I read what I write: they are not what I see or what I have seen, they are the reverse of what is seen and of the power of sight—but they are not the invisible: they are the unsaid residuum;
they are not the other side of reality but, rather, the other side of language, what we have on the tip of our tongue that vanishes before it is said, the other side that cannot be named because it is the opposite of a name:
what is not said is not this or that which we leave unsaid, nor is it neither-this-nor-that: it is not the tree that I say I see but the sensation that I feel on sensing that I see it at the moment when I am just about to say that I see it, an insubstantial but real conjunction of vibrations and sounds and meanings that on being combined suggest the configuration of a green-bronze-black-woody-leafy-sonorous-silent presence;
no, it is not that either, if it is not a name it surely cannot be the description of a name or the description of the sensation of the name or the name of the sensation:
a tree is not the name tree, nor is it the sensation of tree: it is the sensation of a perception of tree that dies away at the very moment of the perception of the sensation of tree;
names, as we already know, are empty, but what we did not know, or if we did know, had forgotten, is that sensations are perceptions of sensations that die away, sensations that vanish on becoming perceptions, since if they were not perceptions, how would we know that they are sensations?;
sensations that are not perceptions are not sensations, perceptions that are not names—what are they?
if you didn’t know it before, you know now: everything is empty;
and the moment I say everything-is-empty, I am aware that I am falling into a trap: if everything is empty, this everything-is-empty is empty too;
no, it is full, full to overflowing, everything-is-empty is replete with itself, what we touch and see and taste and smell and think, the realities that we invent and the realities that touch us, look at us, hear us, and invent us, everything that we weave and unweave and everything that weaves and unweaves us, momentary appearances and disappearances, each one different and unique, is always the same full reality, always the same fabric that is woven as it is unwoven: even total emptiness and utter privation are plenitude (perhaps they are the apogee, the acme, the consummation and the calm of plenitude), everything is full to the brim, everything is real, all these invented realities and all these very real inventions are full of themselves, each and every one of them, replete with their own reality;
and the moment I say this, they empty themselves: things empty themselves and names fill themselves, they are no longer empty, names are plethoras, they are donors, they are full to bursting with blood, milk, semen, sap, they are swollen with minutes, hours, centuries, pregnant with meanings and significations and signals, they are the secret signs that time makes to itself, names suck the marrow from things, things die on this page but names increase and multiply, things die in order that names may live:”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9

James Macpherson photo

“The trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 176.

Andy Goldsworthy photo
Baron d'Holbach photo
William Henry Smyth photo

“This object, which somewhat resembles a flight of wild ducks in shape, is a gathering of minute stars.”

William Henry Smyth (1788–1865) English naval officer and hydrographer

Of the M11 star cluster, which is now known as the "Wild Duck" cluster.
A Cycle of Celestial Objects, 1881 reprint, p. 544.

Toni Morrison photo
Ed Bradley photo
Stendhal photo

“At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes.”

A la Scala, il est d'usage de ne faire durer qu'une vingtaine de minutes ces petites visites que l'on fait dans les loges.
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 6

Jean Henri Fabre photo
Charles Darwin photo

“I assume that cells, before their conversion into completely passive or "formed material," throw off minute granules or atoms, which circulate freely throughout the system, and when supplied with proper nutriment multiply by self-division, subsequently becoming developed into cells like those from which they were derived. These granules for the sake of distinctness may be called … gemmules. They are supposed to be transmitted from the parents to the offspring, and are generally developed in the generation which immediately succeeds, but are often transmitted in a dormant state during many generations and are then developed. Their development is supposed to depend on their union with other partially developed cells or gemmules which precede them in the regular course of growth. … Lastly, I assume that the gemmules in their dormant state have a mutual affinity for each other, leading to their aggregation either into buds or into the sexual elements. … These assumptions constitute the provisional hypothesis which I have called Pangenesis.”

volume II, chapter XXVII: "Provisional Hypothesis of Pangenesis", page 374 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=389&itemID=F877.2&viewtype=image
It is sometimes claimed that modern biologist are dogmatic "Darwinists" who uncritically accept all of Darwin's ideas. This is false: No one today accepts Darwin's hypothesis of gemmules and pangenesis.
The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868)

Kenji Miyazawa photo

“In spring I stopped eating the bodies of living things. Nonetheless, the other day I ate several slices of tuna sashimi as a form of magic to “undertake” my “communication” with “society.” I also stirred a cup of chawanmushi with a spoon. If the fish, while being eaten, had stood behind me and watched, what would he have thought? “I gave up my only life and this person is eating my body as if it were something distasteful.” “He’s eating me in anger.” “He’s eating me out of desperation.” “He’s thinking of me and, while quietly savoring my fat with his tongue, praying, ‘Fish, you will come with me as my companion some day, won’t you?’” “Damn! He’s eating my body!” Well, different fish would have had different thoughts. … Suppose I were the fish, and suppose that not only I were being eaten but my father were being eaten, my mother were being eaten, and my sister were also being eaten. And suppose I were behind the people eating us, watching. “Oh, look, that man has torn apart my sibling with chopsticks. Talking to the person next to him, he swallowed her, thinking nothing of it. Just a few minutes ago her body was lying there, cold. Now she must be disintegrating in a pitch-dark place under the influence of mysterious enzymes. Our entire family have given up our precious lives that we value, we’ve sacrificed them, but we haven’t won a thimbleful of pity from these people.””

Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) Japanese poet and author of children's literature

I must have been once a fish that was eaten.
Letter to Hosaka (May 1918); as quoted in Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 12 https://books.google.it/books?id=D7IwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA12-13.

Jane Roberts photo

“Those portions of the brain, seemingly unused, deal with these other dimensions, and physically, you begin to use these portions, though minutely, for the first time, under psychedelic situations.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 308, Page 217
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 7

James E. Lovelock photo
Harry Turtledove photo

“And what sort of country shall you build upon that watchword, General?" Lord Lyons asked. "You cannot be left entirely alone; you are become, as I said, a member of the family of nations. Further, this war has been hard on you. Much of your land has been ravaged or overrun, and in those places where the Federal army has been, slavery lies dying. Shall you restore it there at the point of a bayonet? Gladstone said October before last, perhaps a bit prematurely, that your Jefferson Davis had made an army, the beginnings of a navy, and, more important than either, a nation. You Southerners may have made the Confederacy into a nation, General Lee, but what sort of nation shall it be?" Lee did not answer for most of a minute. This pudgy little man in his comfortable chair had put into a nutshell his own worries and fears. He'd had scant time to dwell on them, not with the war always uppermost in his thoughts. But the war had not invalidated any of the British minister's questions- some of which Lincoln had also asked- only put off the time at which they would have to be answered. Now that time drew near. Now that the Confederacy was a nation, what sort of nation would it be? At last he said, "Your excellency, at this precise instant I cannot fully answer you, save to say that, whatever sort of nation we become, it shall be one of our own choosing.”

It was a good answer. Lord Lyons nodded, as if in thoughtful approval. Then Lee remembered the Rivington men. They too had their ideas on what the Confederate States of America should become.
Source: The Guns of the South (1992), p. 183

Russell Brand photo
Morarji Desai photo
Gerald James Whitrow photo
Ayaan Hirsi Ali photo
Rousas John Rushdoony photo
Steven M. Greer photo

“This thing came within a few hundred feet of us and only 10 feet above the ground. It signaled to us for about 10 or 15 minutes. It was an extraordinary event.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Greer describing his UFO encounter in July of 1992 in southern England.
Undated
Source: [A. Bahls, Roy, Researcher's Close Encounters Convince Him Of Extraterrestrials, The Virginian-Pilot, March 22, 1995, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=VP&p_theme=vp&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=0EAFF84CB5EACDC1&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM, 2007-05-12, http://nbgoku23.googlepages.com/RESEARCHERSCLOSEENCOUNTERSCONVINCEHI.htm, 2007-05-12]

Zakir Hussain (musician) photo
William Cowper photo

“The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

The Decline and Fall of Science (1976)

Ed Bradley photo

“We welcome folks in Cactus Center if they've got an honest lay;
If their game ain't too durn crooked, we never stop the play;
But a get-rich-quicker blew in, with a game we did n't like,
So we did n't waste the minutes in invitin' him to hike.”

Arthur Chapman (poet) (1873–1935) American poet and newspaper columnist

Discipline in Cactus Center http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#Discipline, st. 1.
Cactus Center http://www.cowboypoetry.com/ac.htm#ccbk (1921)

Jean Tinguely photo

“I need to take a break from this life as a human for 45 minutes and go experience a little bit of immortality.”

D.M. Turner (1962–1996) American drug researcher

Interview with Elizabeth Gips http://www.tripzine.com/articles.asp?id=dmturnergips

Rod Serling photo
Roger Ebert photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo

“Childish and altogether ludicrous is what you yourself are and all philosophers; and if a grown-up man like me spends fifteen minutes with fools of this kind, it is merely a way of passing the time. I've now got more important things to do. Goodbye!”

"Thrasymachus", in "On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death, in Essays and Aphorisms (1970) as translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 76
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Ian McDonald photo
Jeremy Clarkson photo
William Hazlitt photo
Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein photo

“There were many reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem. The following in my view were the main ones. First. The operation was not regarded at Supreme Headquarters as the spearhead of a major Allied movement on the northern flank designed to isolate, and finally to occupy, the Ruhr - the one objective in the West which the Germans could not afford to lose. There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenhower always wanted to give priority to the northern thrust and to scale down the southern one. He ordered this to be done, and he thought that it was being done. It was not being done. Second. The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective - the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take the blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and 1st Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a matter of minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to spare. I did not do so. Third. The weather. This turned against us after the first day and we could not carry out much of the later airborne programme. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and in peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project. Fourth. The 2nd S. S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped up there after its mauling in Normandy. We knew it was there. But we were wrong in supposing that it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation. It was quickly brought into action against the 1st Airborne Division.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Concerning Operation Market Garden in his autobiography, 'The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery' (1958)

Richard Rodríguez photo
Mani Madhava Chakyar photo
George Hendrik Breitner photo

“It is just most delightful to me that I live in this way in the heart of Amsterdam. In a second you can eat somewhere and be back home again. You never have to wait for the tram. It is less than seven minutes [walking] from Dam Square. To me that is so unusual and so pleasant. I walk there daily.... the window [of his new studio] is about 2.25 m wide and high, and underneath a standing window of the same size, breadth-wise.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) 't is al allerheerlijkst voor me, dat ik zoo midden in Amsterdam woon. In een oogenblik kun je ergens gaan eten en weer 't huis zijn. Je hoeft nooit op de tram te gaan staan. 't is niet verder dan een minuut of zeven van de Dam. dat is voor mij zoo ongewoon en zoo prettig. Ik loop er heen, dag in en uit.. ..'t raam [van het atelier] is ongeveer 2.25 m breed en hoog, en daaronder een staand raam van zelfde breedte.
Quote of Breitner in his letter from Amsterdam, 11 May 1893, to Herman van der Weele; from the original letter in the RKD-Archive, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/1154
1890 - 1900

Ellsworth Kelly photo
John Donne photo

“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

I. Insultus Morbi Primus; The first alteration, the first grudging of the sickness.
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

Philippe Starck photo
W. S. Gilbert photo

“I can tell a woman's age in half a minute — and I do!”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

Princess Ida (1884)

Mahatma Gandhi photo
Willa Cather photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Dan Mathews photo
Boris Johnson photo
Victor Villaseñor photo