Quotes & Sayings About Tortoises

One is also reminded of how, in art, the tortoise so often overtakes the hare ... — Clement Greenberg

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands. — Richard Dawkins

All virtuous women, like tortoises, carry their house on their heads, and their chappel in their heart, and their danger in their eye, and their souls in their hands, and God in all their actions. — Jeremy Taylor

When we try to understand something, more often than not, we kill it, and now I can feel the dangers of this encroaching on me: cynicism, bitterness, and infinite sadness...It's impossible to live if you're too aware, too thoughtful. Take nature for example: everything that lives happily and too a ripe old age is not very intelligent. Tortoises live for centuries, water's immortal, and Milton Friedman's still alive. — Martin Page

Tortoises are not well equipped for cross-country navigation. They need longer legs or shallower ditches. — Terry Pratchett

Tortoises are incredible creatures," Dad says earnestly. "What they lack in elegance and beauty they more than make up for in the ability to curl up and defend themselves from predators."
"What, like me? — Holly Smale

We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions. — Charlie Munger

He stepped forward, took a deep breath, and doubled over in a sneezing fit. My werewolf was allergic to tortoises. Why me? — Ilona Andrews

We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day. — Ann Patchett

One of my predecessors used to have people torn to death by wild tortoises. It was not a quick death. — Terry Pratchett

Author reports that a group of tortoises was given to the British by India's natives during the Seven Years War which ended in 1763. The last of those tortoises died in 2004 at the age of 255. — Patrick N. Allitt

How you start is important, very important, but in the end it is how you finish that counts. It is easier to be a self-starter than a self-finisher. The victor in the race is not the one who dashes off swiftest but the one who leads at the finish. In the race for success, speed is less important than stamina. The sticker outlasts the sprinter in life's race. In America we breed many hares but not so many tortoises. — B.C. Forbes

Interesting fact: eagles are the only birds to work out how to eat tortoises. You know? They pick them up, flying up very high, and drop them on to the rocks. Smashes them right open. Amazing. — Terry Pratchett

The tortoise moves very slowly, it moves towards whatever the goal is, to keep a democratic capitalistic society functioning. — Lewis Black

The Italians say it is not necessary to be a stag; but we ought not to be a tortoise. — Benjamin Disraeli

When I was a boy in England long ago, people who traveled on
trains with dogs had to pay for a dog ticket. The question arose
whether I needed to buy a dog ticket when I was traveling with a
tortoise. The conductor on the train gave me the answer: Cats is
dogs and rabbits is dogs but tortoises is insects and travel free
according. — Freeman Dyson

We wait for the tortoises to come. We wait for that lady who walks them. That's how art works. It's never a jackrabbit, or a racehorse. It's the tortoises that hold all the secrets. We've got to be patient enough to wait for them. — Pat Conroy

Anyway.
I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I took my lyre and said: come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument. — Sappho

Tortoises can tell you more about the road than hares. — Khalil Gibran

The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and is more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when all the workers become tortoises. — Taiichi Ohno

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. — Henry David Thoreau

The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and tortoises). — Rich Hall

I'm a huge animal lover - I love animals to death. I've got tortoises and three dogs, and I've had a million animals in the past. I just think that we should do all we can to take care of them. — Roshon Fegan

We live in a culture full of hares; but the tortoise always wins. — Dave Ramsey

... But don't be late, Troy, or I'll ... " She hesitated and laughed, not entirely happily. "I don't suppose I'll ever need to worry about you again, will I? I don't suppose I've ever needed to worry over a magician."
"There are always car accidents," Tabitha declared cheerfully. "A car could come around the corner and ... wallop! You'd need a terrific magician to get out of that one ... "
"Or eagles dropping tortoises," Troy added, looking amused. "That happened in Ancient Greece, you know. An eagle dropped a tortoise on some dramatist and killed him."
"No eagles or tortoises here," said Tabitha, "but a bit could fall off a plane. — Margaret Mahy

The sleeping tortoise takes all its limbs into its carapace. So does the yogi: going back into himself he does not see anything worldly any longer, he makes peace in himself. — B.K.S. Iyengar

The fable says that the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring. — Northrop Frye

I desperately want to visit the Galapagos and meet some giant tortoises. — Lisa Graff

So a lorry-load of tortoises crashed into a train-load of terrapins, I thought "That's a turtle disaster". — Tommy Cooper

A fruitfly is ancient in 40 days,
a mouse at 3 years, a horse at 30,
a man at 100, and some species of
tortoises not until 150 years. — Leonard Hayflick

In a tree-shaded pasture, seventeen adult tortoises randomly stood around. As I fed them spinach leaves sold by an opportune vendor, they tolerated my gentle strokes to their boney skullcaps and the warm black skin on their necks. It was as thin and delicate as the skin on a grandmother's hand. Their obsidian black eyes gleamed with deep wisdom and patience - Dalai Lamas on the half shell. Back — Kristine K. Stevens

Bees buzzed in the bean blossoms. And the sun beat down on the upturned shell of Om.
There is also a hell for tortoises.
He was too tired to waggle his That was all you could do, waggle your legs. And stick your head out as far as it would go and wave it about in the hope that you could lever yourself over. — Terry Pratchett

I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the 'Tortoises' of this world. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. And I suppose, in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in. — Kazuo Ishiguro

Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Slow and steady wins the race. 'The hare and the tortoise — Robert Lloyd