Work Forty Quotes & Sayings

I was very much on the mathematical side, where you probably do your best work before you're forty-five. Having passed that significant date, I thought I would do something else. — John Polkinghorne

One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn't start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old. — Ellen Gilchrist

So, it's not gonna be easy. It's gonna be really hard. We're gonna have to work at this every day, but I want to do that because I want you. I want all of you, forever, you and me, every day. Will you do something for me, please? Just picture your life for me? Thirty years from now, forty years from now? What's it look like? If it's with him- go. Go! I lost you once, I think I can do it again, if I thought that's what you really wanted. But don't you take the easy way out. — Nicholas Sparks

Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws. — Walter Russell

I think I would like to work in the Library."
"The Library," repeated Sanar, looking troubled. "That can be dangerous to a girl of fourteen. Or a woman of forty, for that matter."
"Only in parts," said Ryelle. "The Old Levels."
"You can't work in the Library without going into the Old Levels," said Mirelle somberly. "At least some of the time. I wouldn't be keen on going to some parts of the Library, myself. — Garth Nix

[Look at] the chair you are lounging in. . . . Could you have made it for yourself? . . . How [would you] get, say, the wood? Go and fell a tree? But only after first making the tools for that, and putting together some kind of vehicle to haul the wood, and constructing a mill to do the lumber and roads to drive on from place to place? In short, a lifetime or two to make one chair! . . . If we . . . worked not forty but one-hundred-forty hours per week we couldn't make ourselves from scratch even a fraction of all the goods and services that we call our own. [Our] paycheck turns out to buy us the use of far more than we could possibly make for ourselves in the time it takes us to earn the check. . . . Work . . . yields far more in return upon our efforts than our particular jobs put in. . . . — Timothy Keller

Tiny slices, no frosting, forty-five minutes on the StairMaster: These are the conditions, variations on a theme of vigilance and self-restraint that I've watched women dance to all my life, that I've danced to myself instinctively and still have to work to resist. — Caroline Knapp

I work in a business environment forty hours a week, and writing is what I do to unwind. It allows me to transport myself to a happy place where I can indulge my hopes, beliefs, aspirations and fantasies. It also allows me to live and breathe a topic for eighteen months while I'm researching and writing. — Ashwin Sanghi

I work in a giant building:
forty floors and forty cubicles
per wing, four wings per floor,
one person and one personal
computer per cubicle, a labyrinth
in which everyone's goal is to stay lost. — John Engman

Sweeping the dorm soon's it's empty, I'm after dust mice under his bed when I get a smell of something that makes me realize for the first time since I been in the hospital that the big dorm full of beds, sleeps forty grown men, has always been sticky with a thousand other smells - smells of germicide, zinc ointment, and foot powder, smell of piss and sour old-man manure, of Pablum and eyewash, of musty shorts and socks musty even when they're fresh back from the laundry, the stiff odor of starch in the linen, the acid stench of morning mouths, the banana smell of machine oil, and sometimes the smell of singed hair - but never before now, before he came in, the man smell of dust and dirt from the open fields, and sweat, and work. — Ken Kesey

Wagons rattling and banging,
horses neighing and snorting,
conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip,
fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off
so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!
And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger,
blocking the way and weeping
ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.
And a passerby asks, "What's going on?"
The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time.
From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north,
and even at forty some work the army farms in the west.
When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them;
when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier.
The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,
and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended. — Du Fu

I must go now."
"Stay up the night with me! We'll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We'll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, seashell. Or we'll go to the vegetable market. They've got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we'll go down to Forty-second Street and see the movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan
"
"I work tomorrow."
"Which has nothing to do with it."
"But I'd better go now."
"I know this is unheard in America, but I'll walk you home."
"I live on Twenty-third Street."
"Exactly what I'd hoped. It's over a hundred blocks. — Leonard Cohen

THE GREAT HUMANITY
The great humanity is the deck-passenger on the ship
third class on the train
on foot on the causeway
the great humanity.
The great humanity goes to work at eight
marries at twenty
dies at forty
the great humanity.
Bread is enough for all except the great humanity
rice the same
sugar the same
cloth the same
books the same
are enough for all except the great humanity.
The great humanity has no shade on his soil
no lamp on his road
no glass on his window
but the great humanity has hope
you can't live without hope. — Nazim Hikmet

The special please," she said, waving a coupon from the week's paper. "The young rejuvenating facial. I want to look thirty."
"Mom," Jonathan said. "It's a facial, not a magic wand."
She rolled up the paper and swatted him with it. "Fine, I'll take forty." She gave Lily a hug. "And you! How lovely to see you again!" She turned to Jonathan. "So ... you can make me look forty, right?"
"How about gorgeous?" Jonathan asked his mom. "Does gorgeous work for you? — Jill Shalvis

Where complaints are made of the soldiers, it almost always turns out that the women have insulted them most grossly, swearing at them, and the like. One unpleasant old Dutch woman came in, bursting with wrath, and told the whole narrative of her blameless life, diversified with sobs: - " 'Last January I ran off two of my black people from St. Mary's to Fernandina,' (sob,) - 'then I moved down there myself, and at Lake City I lost six women and a boy,' (sob,) - 'then I stopped at Baldwin for one of the wenches to be confined,' (sob,) - 'then I brought them all here to live in a Christian country' (sob, sob). 'Then the blockheads' [blockades, that is, gunboats] 'came, and they all ran off with the blockheads,' (sob, sob, sob,) 'and left me, an old lady of forty-six, obliged to work for a living.' (Chaos of sobs, without cessation.) — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The true man of genius deliberately subordinates himself, reduces himself to a negative, and allows his genius to play through him as It will. We all know how stupid we are when we try to do things. Seek to make any other muscle work as consistently as your heart does without your silly interference
you cannot keep it up for forty-eight hours. — Aleister Crowley

That God is in truth the sort of bloodthirsty paranoid Who would rend to bits forty-two children for the crime of sassing one of his priests. Don't ask me about the Front Office's policies; I just work here. — Robert A. Heinlein

Texas Rangers are men who cannot be stampeded. We walk into any situation and handle it without instruction from our commander. Sometimes we work as a unit, sometimes we work alone." He turned his attention to the jurors. "We preserve the law. We track down train and bank robbers. We subdue riots. We guard our borders. We'll follow an outlaw clear across the country if we need to. In my four years of service, I've traveled eighty-six thousand miles on horse, nineteen hundred on train, gone on two hundred thirty scouts, made two hundred seventeen arrests, returned five hundred six head of stolen cattle, assisted forty-three local sheriffs, guarded a half dozen jails, and spent more time on the trail than I have in my own bed. We've been around since before the Alamo, and" - he turned to Hood, impaling him with his stare - "we're touchy as a teased snake when riled, so I wouldn't recommend it. — Deeanne Gist

Why can't people just learn to live together in peace and harmony?" said Arthur. Ford gave a loud, very hollow laugh. "Forty-two!" he said with a malicious grin. "No, doesn't work. Never mind. — Douglas Adams

But Zelda was never about plot. Indeed, one's head could explode if all the games were considered one story, since Link is always meeting Zelda and villainous Gannon for the first time. Imagine trying to explain why James Bond has stayed forty years old for forty years, while changing faces and hair color. Better to accept the story as a constant retelling, and don't dwell on continuity matters. Mario has made a cottage industry of jokes about how Bowser had only one playbook - kidnap the princess - and this time it'll work! He's utterly incapable of coming up with any other plan. Aside from that one time he obtained a degree in hotel management. — Jeff Ryan

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas. — G.H. Hardy

And there was nothing quite like the surprise attack of a snarling black bear, even one missing all forty-two teeth, to urge someone back to work. Waking up with several hundred mud-encrusted, reeking pounds on top of you - your neck suffering a hickey of epic proportions - just pushed the limits on what was tolerable. — Cole Alpaugh

It was only by escaping into the desert that Moses and the Jews were able to solidify their identity and reemerge as a social and political force.
Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness, and Mohammed, too, fled Mecca at a time of great peril for a period of retreat. He and just a handful of his most devoted supporters used this period to deepen their bonds, to understand who they were and what they stood for, to let time work its good. Then this little band of believers reemerged to conquer Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula and later, after Mohammed's death, to defeat the Byzantines and the Persian empire, spreading Islam over vast territories. Around the world every mythology has a hero who retreats, even to Hades itself in the case of Odysseus, to find himself. — Robert Greene

There's no such thing as "The One", she once said. They were at dinner in Taipei, with a supplier and his wife. The couple had been married forty years. The idea that there's just one person in the world you're meant to be with, it's illogical, she said. She'd had a few drinks and was enjoying her own loud thoughts. The math just doesn't work! Who you end up with, it's really just an accident of proximity. — Dave Eggers

I did a lot of good work for the rest of the forty years ... science is an incremental thing. Everything builds on everything else, it's a pattern, it's a mosaic. — Gustav Nossal

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu. — W. H. Auden

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it. — Mary Oliver

People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past
the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one's intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty. — Tom Rachman

ADAMS. This is a great work, Sir. How are you to get all the etymologies? JOHNSON. Why, Sir, here is a shelf with Junius, and Skinner, and others; and there is a Welch gentleman who has published a collection of Welch proverbs, who will help me with the Welch. ADAMS. But, Sir, how can you do this in three years? JOHNSON. Sir, I have no doubt that I can do it in three years. ADAMS. But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their Dictionary. JOHNSON. Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times forty is sixteen hundred. As three to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman. — Samuel Johnson

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something - give you something! - and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get! — Sinclair Lewis

You make your own kinds of mistakes, and I'm sure you'll have your share of regrets in life. But commitment was never your problem, sweetie. You have a better chance of making this work than most forty-year-olds I know. My little middle-aged child. Luckily, you seem to have found another old soul. — Stephenie Meyer

He doesn't stop talking for most of the three-hour flight about his time in "'Nam." Finally the conversation slows, and I ask him what he's done since leaving the army.

He sums it up in three words: "I'm in insurance."

And that's it. That's all he has to say about the following forty years.

I think I may be in a similar situation with the whole marriage bit. Three words: "I got married. — Rick Springfield

At forty, I was too old to work as a programmer myself anymore; writing code is a young person's job. — Michael Crichton

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes
until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,
critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove
him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works
of genius? — James N. Frey

I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? — Steve Jobs

Most of my favorite writers are over forty, and so I suppose I'll only name a few of the writers whose work I find myself constantly returning to: Edward P. Jones, Marilynne Robinson, Kazuo Ishiguro, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. — Dinaw Mengestu

Advancing the agenda of America's wealthiest winners under such circumstances would ordinarily be a hard sell. After all, in 2011, twenty-four million Americans were still out of work. The Great Recession had wiped out some $9 trillion in household wealth. But after forty years, the conservative nonprofit ecosystem had grown quite adept at waging battles of ideas. The think tanks, advocacy groups, and talking heads on the right sprang into action, shaping a political narrative that staved off the kind of course correction that might otherwise have been expected. — Jane Mayer

From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice. — Thomas Jefferson

Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end. p. 208 — Marilynne Robinson

Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more so, an afternoon and evening worker. — G. Stanley Hall

If you are a manager, it's your responsibility to keep the work part lively and full; it's not a key component of your job to ensure that employees consistently have a forty-hour workweek. — Eric Schmidt

No design works unless it embodies ideas that are held common by the people for whom the object is intended. — Adrian Forty

I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty. Woman's usual occupations of hand and mind will be as open to me then as they are now; or with no important variation. If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work. — Jane Austen

If you wish to begin life at forty, you must settle two large personal questions first of all. You must find work and play that call for no more energy than you can afford to spend on them. Then you must train your mind, eye and hand to the point of working and playing with ease, grace and precision. — Walter B. Pitkin

PERFECTION The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. — David Bayles

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it. — Studs Terkel

After forty years of close acquaintance with it, I've found that work is kind to its friends and harsh to its enemies. It pays the fellow who dislikes it his exact wages, and they're generally pretty small; but it gives the man who shines up to it all the money he wants and throws in a heap of fun and satisfaction for good measure. — George Horace Lorimer

Four hundred forty-six," Cole whispered.
"What?" she asked.
He kept his head down in what seemed to be a prayer. "He counts. You've smiled at him four hundred and forty-six times as of a few minutes ago. He announces the number every time I see him."
"I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't think you were real. Considering my line of work, I should have more faith in humanity." Cole shook his head. "I think it was smile two hundred eighty-six that drove me the most crazy. It was the night train. Blake was so sick, feverish. Honestly, I was considering taking him to the hospital. But no. He didn't want to miss a smile. He wouldn't even let me drive him. Blake walked the whole way in the pouring rain for number two eighty-six. — Debra Anastasia

Pre-forty, you can wash your face with Tide and use Vaseline for moisturizer, toss on a little mascara and lip gloss, and you're a friggin' cover girl. Those of us on the slippery slope that is the Other Side of Forty can testify
those days are so over. You pore over labels promising everything short of actual rebirth
you will buy most of them for an average of $450 per quarter once
and none of them will work. You will still be getting older and poorer with every passing purchase. — Jill Conner Browne

Maybe it takes forty years of your life to understand how the world seems to work. — Chuck Klosterman

Our late Leader, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with his universal sympathy for all oppressed and his profound understanding of Jesus' revolutionary spirit of love and sacrifice, carried on his revolutionary work for forty years and brought about at last the liberation of the Chinese people. — Chiang Kai-shek

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself - not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. — Michael J. Behe

Today, at twenty-five, Travis is the manager of two Starbucks where he oversees forty employees and is responsible for revenues exceeding $2 million per year. His salary is $44,000 and he has a 401(k) and no debt. He's never late to work. — Charles Duhigg

At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage. I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong. I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die.
You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die. — Jonathan Franzen

My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard ... I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it ... I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered. — Claude Monet

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within - or sometimes only maim him and distort him! — Charles Dickens

Liberals state that many teenagers would rather sell crack for $100 an hour than to flip hamburgers for a minimum wage. Using the same liberal logic, you might think it would make more sense for the average middle-class worker to rob banks rather than work a forty-hour week? The reason why most people, rich and poor, do not commit crimes because they know it is wrong to do so. — Rush Limbaugh

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information - the bad news - more memorable than positive information - or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala - the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: "Why did my boss say that? Why doesn't my boss like me?" Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed. — Meg Jay

But it wasn't Neil or Buzz that had interested her, or even the moon itself. She had been attracted to the missions' most unsung hero: Michael Collins, alone in Columbia, drifting around the moon in exquisite solitary splendor while Buzz and Neil had gone about the terrestrial work of putting down a plaque, erecting a flag, and gathering rocks. Every two hours Michael Collins had gone out of radio contact for forty-eight minutes when the moon stood between himself and Earth, and during those minutes he was the most alone person in the history of people. Helen still liked to think about that. That had always been her dream: space, not a location with it, just space. — Meg Howrey

Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature subtract the work of the men above forty, and while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we would practically be where we are today ... The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty. — William Osler

Would you rather work forty hours a week at a job you hate or eighty hours a week doing work you love? — Jay Samit

While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don't plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive. It — Bernie Sanders

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of the mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. — Marilynne Robinson

It's my earliest memory: arranging my brother's marbles into words. It is summer, and I am beneath the oak that stands in the back corner of the work yard. Thomas, ten, whom I love above all the others, has taught me nine words: SARAH, GIRL, BOY, GO, STOP, JUMP, RUN, UP, DOWN. He has written them on a parchment and given me a pouch of forty-eight glass marbles with which to spell them out, enough to shape two words at a time. — Sue Monk Kidd

Will wolfed down his sandwich, drank half his water, and went to work examining the boxes. He discovered that all of them had dates scrawled on the side, so he cranked up to his highest speed, motored around the room rearranging them, and had them neatly arranged in chronological order in less than twenty minutes. Three equal rows, forty boxes in each, lined up in the center of the room. Some were sealed; most were open. Their weight varied greatly; some were packed solid and heavy with books and ledgers, while others contained nothing but rolled-up maps. — Mark Frost

Blurbs don't work anymore!" was another. "You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!" seemed at best debatable. — Scott Westerfeld

Yet early on in the marriage I found myself
despite all my self-promises
drifting into the role of wife: focusing on the renovations of the apartment, doing silly little domestic things instead of writing, using the wife role as cop-out from my work, my work which had always involved me in so much controversy and which some part of me longed to retreat from ... Even when I was forty-seven, full of my own power, my own identity, something in me wanted to escape from the fray and dwindle into a wife. It seemed to comfy, so safe. — Erica Jong

If you want to live and you want to prosper, you've got to be ambitious. You've got to be ready to sacrifice leisure and pleasure, and you've got to plan ahead. I was forty years old before I had any money at all. But these things don't happen overnight. Now, how many people are there who will wait that long to be successful, and work all the time? Not very many. Maybe they're right. Maybe I'm a bloody fool. But I don't think I am. — Roy Thomson

Therefore, at about the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a "regular job." I have not always been able to fulfill this vow. I have had to work (in a reasonably independent manner) for the Church and for a graduate school, but since the age of forty-two I have been a free lance, a rolling stone, and a shaman ... — Alan W. Watts

It was the lie of the American Dream -work hard and you'll win, that poisonous mantra poured down the throat of every child, every teacher, every adult who wondered why they were still stuck in the same place after forty years of overtime, with nothing to show but bone-weary exhaustion, shitty health, and a pile of bills. — Emma Raveling

I motivate what I see in young people because we employ about forty thousand young people in our various Chick-fil-A units. Some of them come to work because they need to work; others just work because they just like to work. There's nothing wrong with that. — S. Truett Cathy

Fifty is the new forty. I always thought my best work would come in the years forty to sixty, if I was fortunate enough to hang around - and it is hard to stick around. — Bruce Willis

I read a recent statistic that eighty-seven percent of women are dissatisfied with themselves, and over forty-seven percent of men. My work is visu-medicine to heal people and see beauty within people. — Jamel Shabazz

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing - or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for. — Bob Black

Don't be a salary slave! If you are going to do anything in this world, you must start before you are forty, before your period of initiative has ended. Do it now! — Robert Cochrane

I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande's garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread. And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn't come. T — Robin McKinley

Please," said Lirael ... "I think I would like to work in this Library."
"The Library," repeated Sanar, looking troubled. "That can be dangerous to a girl of fourteen. Or a woman of forty, for that matter. — Garth Nix

I'm thirty-eight, going on forty. I'm not like Naoko. There's nobody waiting for me to get out, no family to take me back. I don't have any work to speak of, and almost no friends. And after seven years, I don't know what's going on out there. Oh, I'll read a paper in the library every once in a while, but I haven't set foot outside this property for seven years. I wouldn't know what to do if I left." "But maybe a new world would open up for you," I said. "It's worth a try, don't you think?" "Hmm, you may be right," she said, turning her cigarette lighter over and over in her hand. "But I've got my own set of problems. I — Haruki Murakami

Many people over forty have at least one health condition that affects their ability to work a forty hour work week effectively. Human Resources (HR), doctors and governments have known this fact for decades. — Steven Magee

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. "With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art," said Atkinson. — Walter Isaacson

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. — Robert Louis Stevenson

We need to figure out how to launch multiple times a day," Musk said. "The thing that's important in the long run is establishing a self-sustaining base on Mars. In order for that to work - in order to have a self-sustaining city on Mars - there would need to be millions of tons of equipment and probably millions of people. So how many launches is that? Well, if you send up 100 people at a time, which is a lot to go on such a long journey, you'd need to do 10,000 flights to get to a million people. So 10,000 flights over what period of time? Given that you can only really depart for Mars once every two years, that means you would need like forty or fifty years. — Ashlee Vance

Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afraid of dragons. They have Smaugophobia. "Oh those awful Orcs," they bleat, flocking after Edmund Wilson. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they'll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they'll have to redefine what literature is. And they're too damned lazy to do it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

So," said Ruth, "how bad is it?" "You haven't read it?" "Not all of it." "Well," I said, politely, "it needs some work." "How much?" The words "Hiroshima" and "nineteen forty-five" floated briefly into my mind. "It's fixable," I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually. — Robert Harris

Most people work fifty weeks a year so they can do this the other 2. Well the smart ones live in a ski resort, where the boss lets them have powder snow days off. And almost forty feet of snow falls every winter thats a lot of days off. A lot of doing what you moved here to do. Most major ski resorts are now so big that regardles of what kind ofjob you have in a city there's probably a job almost exactly like yours in a ski rsort like this. So quit your job and rent that U-haul trailer now so next winter this can be you. Not you just sitting there watching this and wishing that this was you. — Warren Miller

Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion. Compassion — Thich Nhat Hanh

She's a-going," he says. "Her mind is set on it." It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy or more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night-gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You all will have to look out for pa the best you can," she said. "I'm tired. — William Faulkner

Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out no sewage, because water, gas, and a magic form of invisible power called electricity would come into their home through pipes and wires. They would jump at the chance to have such a home, but they would warily ask ho they could possibly afford it. Suppose that you then told them that to earn such a home, they need only ensure that father and mother both have to go to work for eight hours in an office, travelling roughly forty minutes each way in a horseless carriage, and that the children need not work at all, but should go to school to be sure of getting such jobs when they start to work at twenty. They would be more than dumbfounded; they would be delirious with excitement. — Matt Ridley

The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating ... and you finish off as an orgasm. — George Carlin