Quotes about span

A collection of quotes on the topic of span, life, time, timing.

Quotes about span

Jacque Fresco photo
Muhammad al-Baqir photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“Now who art thou, that on the bench wouldst sit
In judgment at a thousand miles away,
With the short vision of a single span?”

Canto XIX, lines 79–81 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Muhammad Ali photo
Terry Pratchett photo
Franz Kafka photo
Lewis Carroll photo
Aldo Leopold photo
Fyodor Tyutchev photo
Miguel de Cervantes photo

“As they use to say, spick and span new.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 58.

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada photo
Richard Wagner photo

“That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part III
Religion and Art (1880)

Viktor Schauberger photo
Angelus Silesius photo
Barack Obama photo
Lauren Bacall photo

“Well, his attention span was not long, shall we say.”

Lauren Bacall (1924–2014) American actress, model

Speaking of Frank Sinatra
Larry King interview (2005)

William Wilberforce photo

“The literary opposers of Christianity, from Herbert to Hume, have been seldom read. They made some stir in their day: during their span of existence they were noisy and noxious; but like the locusts of the east, which for a while obscure the air, and destroy the verdure, they were soon swept away and forgotten.”

William Wilberforce (1759–1833) English politician

Source: Real Christianity (1797), p. 342.
Context: In our own days, when it is but too clear that infidelity increases, it is not in consequence of the reasonings of the infidel writers having been much studied, but from the progress of luxury, and the decay of morals: and, so far as this increase may be traced at all to the works of sceptical writers; it has been produced, not by argument and discussion, but by sarcasms and points of wit, which have operated on weak minds, or on nominal Christians, by bringing gradually into contempt, opinions which, in their case, had only rested on the basis of blind respect and the prejudices of education. It may therefore be laid down as an axiom, that infidelity is in general a disease of the heart more than of the understanding. If Revelation were assailed only by reason and argument, it would have little to fear. The literary opposers of Christianity, from Herbert to Hume, have been seldom read. They made some stir in their day: during their span of existence they were noisy and noxious; but like the locusts of the east, which for a while obscure the air, and destroy the verdure, they were soon swept away and forgotten.' Their very names would be scarcely found, if Leland had not preserved them from oblivion.

Stephen King photo
Laurence Sterne photo

“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within the span of his little life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

Laurence Sterne (1713–1768) Irish/English writer

Variant: What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests himself in everything.

Ellen DeGeneres photo

“Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: The Funny Thing Is...

Scott Westerfeld photo
Ernest Hemingway photo
Jodi Picoult photo
Christopher Moore photo

“He has the attention span of a hummingbird.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Source: The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

William Paley photo
Arthur Jensen photo
Paul Graham photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
Poul Anderson photo

“History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 147 Cited in: Madeline M. Henderson (1966) Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: a literature review. p. 72.

Robert E. Howard photo
Tad Williams photo

“I’m your apprentice!” Simon protested. “When are you going to teach me something?”
“Idiot boy! What do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to teach you to read and to write. That’s the most important thing. What do you want to learn?”
“Magic!” Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.
“And what about reading…?” the doctor asked ominously.
Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him at every turn. “I don’t know,” he said. What’s so important about reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things. Why should I want to read books?”
Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard fence. “Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you…what a wonderful, charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!” The doctor chuckled appreciatively, deep in his throat.
“What do you mean?” Simon’s eyebrows moved together as he frowned. “Why is it wonderful and stupid?”
“Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer,” Morgenes laughed. Stupid because…because young people are made stupid, I suppose—as tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with stings—it is their protection against life’s unkindnesses.”
“Begging your pardon?” Simon was totally flummoxed now.
“Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “—books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.”
“Magic? Traps?”
“Books are a form of magic—” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “—because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No—or at least, probably not.
But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu or lost Khandia, you have also but to open a book….”
“Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word “magic.” “What about traps, then? Why ‘traps’?”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about the room, “the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some particular, elusive, shining beast—one that might otherwise die unseen.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 7, “The Conqueror Star” (pp. 92-93).

S. I. Hayakawa photo
Lyndall Urwick photo
S. I. Hayakawa photo
Thomas Sowell photo

“Key indicators require some specified time span during which they are to be tabulated for purposes of reward or penalty. The time span can vary enormously according to the process and the indicator.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 1 : The Role of Knowledge

Luís de Camões photo

“Ah! where shall weary man take sanctuary,
where live his little span of life secure?
and 'scape of Heaven serene th' indignant storms
that launch their thunders at us earthen worms?”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme, e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?
Stanza 106, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Verghese Kurien photo
John Horgan (journalist) photo
Caterina Davinio photo

“The head tumbles between the legs
like a wooden ball
you fall, dark night
in the eyes,
the door a span away
inaccessible
you are on your knees
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

The Book of Opium (1975 - 1990), Overdose
Source: Caterina Davinio, Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990] (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990), Puntoacapo Editrice, Novi Ligure 2012. English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman.</ref>

Chris Cornell photo
Peter Sellars photo
Lyndall Urwick photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Bram van Velde photo

“Paris with its multitude of art directions calls continuously to the deepest penetration and recognition of your inner essence. Only in this way it is possible to create work that refers the time span.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

in his letter to H. E. Kramer, 25-10-1926, as quoted in: Bram van Velde, A Tribute, Municipal Museum De Lakenhal Leiden, Municipal Museum Schiedam, Museum de Wieger, Deurne 1994, p. 44 (English translation: Charlotte Burgmans)
1920's

S. I. Hayakawa photo
Nelson Mandela photo
Oscar Niemeyer photo
Karen Lord photo

“That was the nature of chaos; its effects spanned time in ways that were not always immediately discernible, not even by beings outside of time.”

Karen Lord (1968) Barbadian novelist and sociologist of religion

Source: Redemption in Indigo (2010), Chapter 9 “A Stranger is Coming to Makendha” (p. 69)

Ben Klassen photo
Václav Havel photo
Freeman Dyson photo
George Eliot photo
Kent Hovind photo
Joan Didion photo
Max Tegmark photo
Asger Jorn photo
Kent Hovind photo

“Eight simple steps of what I think caused the Flood and explain all these strange phenomena on the planet. Then we'll go into a little bit more detail and then we'll close this down.
1. Noah and the animals got safely in the ark.
2. A 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space. As it was breaking up, some of the fragments got caught and became the rings around the planets. They made the craters on the Moon, the craters on some of the planets, and what was left over came down and splattered on top of the North and South pole.
3. This super cold snow fell on the poles mostly, burying the mammoths, standing up.
4. The dump of ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep. The spreading ice caused the Ice Age effects. The glacier effects that we see. It buried the mammoths. It made the earth wobble around for a few thousand years. And it made the canopy collapse, which used to protect the earth. And it broke open the fountains of the deep.
5. During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals would settle out, and dead plants, and all get buried. They would become coal, if they were plants, and oil if they're animals. And those are still found today in huge graveyards. Fossils found in graveyards. Oil found in big pockets under the ground.
6. During the last few months of the flood, the unstable plates of the earth would shift around. Some places lifted up; other places sank down. That's going to form ocean basins and mountain ranges. And the runoff would cause incredible erosion like the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks.
7. Over the next few hundred years, the ice caps would slowly melt back retreating to their current size. The added water from the ice melt would raise the ocean level creating what's called a continental shelf. It would also absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere which allows for radiation to get in which is going to shorten people's life spans. And in the days of Peleg, it finally took affect.
8. The earth still today shows the effects of this devastating flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Neal Stephenson photo
Grant Morrison photo

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Subramanian Swamy photo

“It has a very small life span. It is a party led by people committed to naxal ideology. They are not improving the society, but rather disrupting it.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

On Aam Aadmi Party, as quoted in "AAP is led by people committed to naxal ideology, alleges Subramanian Swamy" http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/aap-is-led-by-people-committed-to-naxal-ideology-alleges-subramanian-swamy/1/331149.html, India Today (13 December 2013)
2011-2014

50 Cent photo

“Fronting on me will shorten your life-span.”

50 Cent (1975) American rapper, actor, businessman, investor and television producer

I'm Supposed to Die Tonight
Song lyrics, The Massacre (2005)

Dhyan Chand photo
John Davies (poet) photo
Garry Kasparov photo
Timothy Leary photo

“Giger’s work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

Commenting on surrealist H. R. Giger. [Martin, Douglas, H. R. Giger, Swiss Artist, Dies at 74; His Vision Gave Life to ‘Alien’ Creature, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/arts/h-r-giger-swiss-artist-dies-at-74-his-vision-gave-life-to-alien-creature.html, 14 May 2014, New York Times, 14 May 2014]

Alfred de Zayas photo
Sidney Lanier photo
Kent Hovind photo
Anne Brontë photo
Perry Anderson photo
Kurt Lewin photo
Samuel Butler (poet) photo

“While the honour thou hast got
Is spick and span new.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 398
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

Statius photo

“Barren are the years behind me. This is the first day of my span, here is the threshold of my life.”
Steriles transmisimus annos: haec aevi mihi prima dies, hic limina vitae.

ii, line 12
Silvae, Book IV

Allen C. Guelzo photo
Michael Moorcock photo
S. I. Hayakawa photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Chuck Klosterman photo

“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime. It's easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven't even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there's still one more tier to all this; there is always one person who you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real--but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)

Kent Hovind photo
Isaac Watts photo

“Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

"False Greatness" in Horae Lyricae Book II (1706).
Compare: "I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man", Seneca, On a Happy Life (L'Estrange's Abstract), chap. i
&: "It is the mind that makes the man, and our vigour is in our immortal soul", Attributed uncertainly to Ovid
1700s

Whittaker Chambers photo

“SPAN ID=All_that_we> All that we have to do is to pick them out of the dictionary and string them in the right order…. </SPAN”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics, p.68

Gloria E. Anzaldúa photo
Anthony Watts photo
S. I. Hayakawa photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo

“The listener with no preconceptions hears massive waves of sound breaking over him and forms from them the image of a passionate soul seeking and finding the path to faith and peace in God through a life of struggle and a vigorous pursuit of ideals. It is impossible not to hear the confessional tone of this musical language; Liszt’s sonata becomes - perhaps involuntarily on the part of the composer - an autobiographical document and one which reveals an artist in the Faustian mold in the person of its author. As in the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, the underlying religious concept which dominates and permeates the whole work demands a special kind of approach. Whereas representations of human passions and conflicts force themselves on our understanding with their powerfully suggestive coloring, this concept only becomes manifest to those souls who are prepared to soar to the same heights. The equilibrium of the sonata’s hymnic chordal motif, the transformation of its defiant battle motif (first theme) into a triumphant fanfare, and its appearance in bright, high notes on the harp, together with the devotional atmosphere of the Andante, represent a particular challenge to the listener; he is, after all, also expected to grasp the wide-spanned arcs of sound which, from the first hesitant descending octaves to the radiant final chords, build up a graphic panorama of the various stages of progress of a human spirit filled with faith and hope. As the reflection of a remarkable artistic personality worthy of deep admiration and, by extension, of the whole Romantic period, Liszt’s B minor Sonata deserves lasting recognition.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

About the Liszt Sonata in B minor

William H. McNeill photo
Peter M. Senge photo