Years To Centuries Quotes & Sayings

To the Materialist things like nations, classes, civilizations must be more important than individuals, because the individuals live only seventy odd years each and the group may last for centuries. But to the Christian, individuals are more important, for they live eternally; and races, civilizations and the like, are in comparison the creatures of a day. — C.S. Lewis

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. — Will Durant

The world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves can not drown him. He snaps his fingers at laws; and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We might expect intelligent life and technological communities to have emerged in the universe billions of years ago. Given that human society is only a few thousand years old, and that human technological society is mere centuries old, the nature of a community with millions or even billions of years of technological and social progress cannot even be imagined ... What would we make of a billion-year-old technological community? — Paul Davies

Technology is the new religion of urban China, and no longer just in the coastal cities. Having wasted decades, centuries almost, overcoming traditional objections to progress, and then wasted thirty years convulsing to a Maoist revolutionary tune, the Chinese have finally gotten themselves into a position where they can develop technology and begin to take on the world. Everywhere you see signs that say REVIVE THE NATION THROUGH SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. — Rob Gifford

When I told you I wanted to try, I spoke the truth. When I turned away, it was for my former court, and when I tried to make another faery love me, it was for that court. I've lived for my whole life trying to bring the Summer Court back to the strength it once was. In all of those years, in centuries , I've only wished myself free of duty because of one reason. You. — Melissa Marr

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos. — John Bagot Glubb

I'm over a thousand years old. I've seen it all. You, sweetcheeks, are nothing new." At what must have been an outraged expression on her face, he laughed again. "Come on. Surely you can't think you are the only female out there who's had a rough life, had her heart walked on, been kept in a dungeon for three centuries, blah, blah, pick your trauma, and are now stomping around with all this pent-up anger you spill like acid on everyone who gets to know you." He narrowed his gaze at her. "How close am I?"
Sin's mouth worked, but nothing came out. She finally snapped it shut to avoid looking like a fish gasping on the bank of a river.
"That's what I thought." He made a shooing gesture with his hand. "No, run along and go be caustic with someone who cares. Oh, wait, no one cares, do they? Because you won't let them
— Larissa Ione

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests - medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view.

Sometimes I have a sense that this house - our relationship in it, with it, with each other - is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame. — J.P. Delaney

Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come. — Denis Diderot

The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hundred years before resurfacing, suddenly and unexpectedly, in America in 1857 as neither hide nor hair. It is dearly unlikely that the phrase went into a linguistic coma for four centuries. So who was quietly preserving it for four hundred years, and why did it so abruptly return to prominence in the sixth decade of the nineteenth century in a country two thousand miles away? — Bill Bryson

It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world
if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a
world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite
and world bankers is surely preferable to the national
auto-determination practiced in past centuries. — David Rockefeller

From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing - absolutely nothing - to teach Indigenous people about how to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage - carnage that has yet to even slow down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500 years of Christian domination. — Brian McLaren

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. — Albert Camus

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries. — Alex Campbell

It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death. — Herbert Mason

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year. — Lance Morrow

Look up," the darkness whispered,
"Do you wish to travel time?
For there are centuries of stories
Hidden inside each star's shine.
Yet what you see is just a sentence
In a tale with many more,
For the light reaching us now
Left the home countless years before.
And someday in the future
Long after your last goodbye,
Perhaps somebody else
Will turn their eyes upto the sky.
And where now you just see darkness
They will see a brand new light,
The beginning of a story
That has just left home tonight. — Emily Hanson

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries. — William Irwin Thompson

You can take away my anger, my fear, my fury, even my pain, but I could never live with myself if I'm not the one to bring that demon to justice. You're all the family I have left, Serwa, and I pledged myself to you when I was a man-child of twenty-one years. Now, as a man of centuries, that responsibility hasn't changed. If anything, it's only gotten stronger. — N.D. Jones

The exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment for we will be reliving John Paul's life for many days and weeks and even years and decades and centuries to come. — Shepard Smith

They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'll all perish together, and in this twentieth century.... — John Horne Burns

I have lived with others more powerful than I in Belle Morte's line for centuries, Anita. I, more than most, know just how much you must fight every night of your existence not to be consumed by their power." He paused and then whispered so that it filled the darkened car, "If you are not careful, their beauty will become both heaven and hell, you will betray every oath, abandon every loyalty, give up your heart, your mind, your body, and your immortal soul to have them near you but one more night. Then one cold night, a hundred years after the passion is spent, and nothing but ashes remain, you look up and see someone gazing at you and you know that look, you've seen it before. A hundred years later and someone gazes upon you as if you were heaven itself, but you know in your heart of hearts that its not heaven you're offering them, its hell. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Well,' I said, 'Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn't what you feel in New York - 'He was smiling. I stopped.
'What do you feel in New York?' he asked.
'Perhaps you feel,' I told him, 'all the time to come. There's such power there, everything is in such movement. You can't help wondering - I can't help wondering - what it will all be like -
many years from now. — James Baldwin

How many other old enemies were in this crowd? Percy began to realize that every battle he'd ever won had only been a temporary victory. No matter how strong or lucky he was, no matter how many monsters he destroyed, Percy would eventually fail. He was only one mortal. He would get too old, too weak, or too slow. He would die. And these monsters ... they lasted forever. They just kept coming back. Maybe it would take them months or years to re-form, maybe even centuries. But they would be reborn.
Seeing them assembled in Tartarus, Percy felt as hopeless as the spirits in the River Cocytus. So what if he was a hero? So what if he did something brave? Evil was always here, regenerating, bubbling under the surface. Percy was no more than a minor annoyance to these immortal beings. They just had to outwait him. Someday, Percy's sons or daughters might have to face them all over again. — Rick Riordan

For hundreds of years, the human race has dreamt of a world where knowledge could be shared universally, where every human being on the planet could have access to our storehouse of knowledge. Because knowledge is power, and shared knowledge is a superpower. Now, after centuries, we have it within our grasp to realize one of our most beautiful dreams. — Cory Doctorow

Being a father, having an heir, seem to add an extra dimension to David. He had always been of vivid, animating presence in any room he entered. But now he would come from visiting the boy crackling with even greater energy and force. He had been engaged listener, ready to learn what any man might have to offer in discussion, but now there was an additional depth to his questions, a more far-reaching vision behind his decisions. He thought now beyond the span of years, and into a future that glistened ahead into centuries. It's one thing, I suppose, to have a prophet tell you that you will found a dynasty. Now, it seemed, he allowed himself to truly believe it. — Geraldine Brooks

It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother's womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him. — Voltaire

My Seryozha. My holy little fool. You've spent these last few years working so hard to become an asshole. Despite your best efforts, you're becoming a man instead. And I know you want to become so great an asshole that centuries from now people will speak of wiping their Sergeis. But you're not an asshole. You're my son. So when you want to disgrace yourself, remember, little one, that you are all of your father's pride. — Anthony Marra

At any rate', said I, 'we can now state the problem accurately. People usually think the problem is how to reconcile what we now know about the size of the universe with our traditional ideas of religion. That turns out not to be the problem at all. The real problem is this. The enormous size of the universe and the insignificance of the earth were known for centuries, and no one ever dreamed that they had any bearing on the religious question. Then, less than a hundred years ago, they are suddenly trotted out as an argument against Christianity. And the people who trot them out carefully hush up the fact that they were known long ago. Don't you think that all you atheists are strangely unsuspicious people? — C.S. Lewis

Though his public teaching lasted only three years, it has been scrutinized by scholars in every science - among them theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to name a few. Jesus' influence has founded universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. Now spanning the entire globe, Jesus' followers have been inspired throughout the centuries to set up educational institutions to teach what he taught. — Jon Morrison

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor -- to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades -- even centuries -- will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge. — Hope Jahren

People seem to lose all respect for the past; events succeed each other with such velocity that the most remarkable one of a few years gone by, is no more remembered than if centuries had closed over it. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

It takes not a few centuries, or even millenniums, but millions of years for a subtle evolutionary change to become noticeable. — Abhijit Naskar

Of course, when you shut off your brain from rational analysis, any book is dangerous. Taking literally ancient parables from thousands of years ago is much more dangerous than playing with a loaded gun. Ancient scrawls, written by different authors in different centuries with different agendas
yeah, let's get mad literal about that.
The literalness problem is compounded in religion by the circular logic of not being allowed to question anything, or else you're lacking faith. — Bill Maher

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. — Carl Sagan

As heirs to a legacy more than two centuries old, it is understandable why present-day Americans would take their own democracy for granted. A president freely chosen from a wide-open field of two men every four years; a Congress with a 99% incumbency rate; a Supreme Court comprised of nine politically appointed judges whose only oversight is the icy scythe of Death
all these reveal a system fully capable of maintaining itself. But our perfect democracy, which neither needs nor particularly wants voters, is a rarity. It is important to remember there still exist other forms of government in the world today, and that dozens of foreign countries still long for a democracy such as ours to be imposed on them. — Jon Stewart

We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have. — Howard Warren Buffett

One of my problems, so to speak, is that, in America, we tend to think in relatively short-term. In the Middle East and Asia and other parts of the world, they think in terms of centuries or 500 years or 1,000 years. — Jay Rockefeller

Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty. — Nora Waln

Louis B. Mayer is one of those with a claim to posessing the equation ... he began to buy up nickelodeon arcades in the years before the First World War in and around Boston. He had noticed that people liked going into the dark to see the light ... the appeal of the movies is beyond the sensible, rational or the hard-working. Going into the dark, afte centuries of progress in which mankind has staggered toward artificial light, smacks of delicious perversity. — Edward Jay Epstein

[The Dalai Lama] told me some years ago, "I've made every concession to China, and I've been as open and tolerant as I could, and still things get worse in Tibet." If you look at it from one point of view, as he himself says, his monastic position of forbearance and nonviolence hasn't reaped any benefits. And yet, he's thinking in terms of the long term, of centuries. — Pico Iyer

The basic idea is that there is this group that, over the centuries, has learned to control reincarnation. John's character stumbles into that realization, and it's a lot closer to him than he would ever have wanted to know. It's a metaphor for when you get in a fight with your significant other and you go, "Who is this?," or you look in the mirror and go, "Why did I say that?" It's the intruder. When you threw a temper tantrum at two years old, it's them. — Glen Morgan

Americans ... have wrought a country that has after more than two centuries yet to evidence a single year during which it was not making war upon someone, somewhere, for some reason. — Ward Churchill

The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them. Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The feeling will pervade the Galaxy that only what a man can grasp for himself at that moment will be of any account. Ambitious men will not wait and unscrupulous men will not hang back. By their every action they will hasten the decay of the worlds. Have me killed and Trantor will fall not within three centuries but within fifty years and you, yourself, within a single year. — Isaac Asimov

But if the ants are not despondent because they have failed to produce a new social invention or convention in 65 million years, why should we be discouraged because some of our institutions and castes have not been able to evolve a new idea in the past fifty centuries? — William Morton Wheeler

Marvelously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed. I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go o look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close. — John Wyndham

Horacio paused to pour himself another glass of brandy. "Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, Prudencia? You can't build yourself a world made to measure, but you can build a village. In a way, all of us here belong to a club of refugees. Your employer is one of the few inhabitants with family roots in San Ireneo. He came back a few years ago and set it all up. You may not know it, but his father's family has lived here for centuries." Miss — Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity. — Herman Melville

The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements men had reached
and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example: he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance, spanning the infamous detour of the Dark and Middle Ages. — Ayn Rand

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years. — Bjorn Lomborg

Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for
annually, not oftener
if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. — Mark Twain

It's impossible for minorities, impossible for people of color to be ever guilty of hate crimes. Because their only crimes are justified. Their crimes are justifiable. It's retribution and payback for years and decades and maybe even centuries of oppressive behavior at the hands of the white majority. — Rush Limbaugh

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired
that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge. — Thomas Hardy

We have to get tough with the Russians. They don't know how to behave. They are like bulls in a china shop. They are only 25 years old. We are over 100 and the British are centuries older. We have got to teach them how to behave. — Harry S. Truman

The battered woman
for she wore a skirt
with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love
love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over. — Virginia Woolf

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. — Gregory Benford

You make the mistake of considering Christianity as something that developed over the course of a few years, from the death of Jesus to the time the gospels were written. But Christianity wasn't new. Only the name was new. Christianity was merely a stage in the meeting, cross-fertilization, metamorphosis of Western logic and Eastern mysticism. Look how the religion itself changed over the centuries, reinterpreting itself to meet changing times. Christianity is just a new name for a conglomeration of old myths and philosophies. All the gospels do is retell the sun myth and garble some of the ideas from the Greeks and Romans. — Michael Moorcock

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."4 — Neil Postman

Have they forgotten that I'm in here? They'll have to bring more food, or at least more water, or else I will starve, I will shrivel, my skin will dry out, all yellow like old linen; I will turn into a skeleton, I will be found months, years, centuries from now on, and they will say Who is this, she must have slipped our mind, Well sweep all those bones and rubbish into the corner, but save the buttons, no sense in having them go to waste, there's no help for it now. — Margaret Atwood

We - humanity - didn't come this far by being afraid. Explorers and visionaries have willingly headed off to certain death for thousands of years and by doing so brought us to where we are today. No one has ever told us 'no' and succeeded in making it stick for long.

We accede to these aliens' demands and we'll wither away. It may take centuries or even millennia, but we'll be so busy cowering in fear we'll forget to move forward.

I say we fight. — G.S. Jennsen

Our federal income tax law defines the tax y to be paid in terms of the income x; it does so in a clumsy enough way by pasting several linear functions together, each valid in another interval or bracket of income. An archeologist who, five thousand years from now, shall unearth some of our income tax returns together with relics of engineering works and mathematical books, will probably date them a couple of centuries earlier, certainly before Galileo and Vieta. — Hermann Weyl

It takes no more research than a trip to almost any public library or college to show the incredibly lopsided coverage of slavery in the United States or in the Western Hemisphere, as compared to the meager writings on even larger number of Africans enslaved in the Islamic countries of the Middle East and North Africa, not to mention the vast numbers of Europeans also enslaved in centuries past in the Islamic world and within Europe itself. At least a million Europeans were enslaved by North African pirates alone from 1500 to 1800, and some Europeans slaves were still being sold on the auction blocks in the Egypt, years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed blacks in the United States. — Thomas Sowell

For eighteen centuries every engine of destruction that human science, philosophy, wit, reasoning or brutality could bring to bear against a book has been brought to bear against that book to stamp it out of the world, but it has a mightier hold on the world today than ever before. If that were man's book it would have been annihilated and forgotten hundreds of years ago ... — R.A. Torrey

Whosoever considers the immense labors undertaken by Catholic exegetes during well nigh two thousand years, so that the word of God, imparted to men through the Sacred Letters, might daily be more deeply and fully understood and more intensely loved, will easily be convinced that it is the serious duty of the faithful, and especially of priests, to make free and holy use of this treasure, accumulated throughout so many centuries by the greatest intellects. — Pope Pius XII

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay. — Bryan Procter

Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat. — Calvin Coolidge

In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly. — Claude Levi-Strauss

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. — Henry Ford

Francis began the actual illumination of the lambskin. The intricacies of scrollwork and the excruciating delicacy of the gold-inlay work would, because of the brevity of his spare-project time, make it a labor of many years; but in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seemed to flow, a lifetime was only brief eddy, even for the man who lived it. There was a tedium of repeated days and repeated seasons; then there were aches and pains, finally Extreme Unction, and a moment of blackness at the end-or at the beginning, rather. For then the small shivering soul who had endured the tedium, endured it badly or well, would find itself in a place of light, find itself absorbed in the burning gaze of infinitely compassionate eyes as it stood before the Just One. And then the King would say: "Come," or the King would say: "Go," and only for that moment had the tedium of years existed. It would be hard to believe differently during such an age as Francis knew. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

In fact, scientists have taken advantage of this effect by using the amount of red in contemporary paintings of sunsets to estimate the intensity of volcanic eruptions. Several Greek scientists, led by C. S. Zerefos, digitally measured the amount of red - relative to other primary colors - in more than 550 samples of landscape art by 181 artists from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries to produce estimates of the amount of volcanic ash in the air at various times. Paintings from the years following the Tambora eruption used the most red paint; those after Krakatoa came a close second. — William K. Klingaman

When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. — Alice Walker

The fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They have not proved their case ... It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested and tested over the centuries. — Richard E. Berendzen

The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time - the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes - and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine ... dispensed Time in blowing weathers. — Ray Bradbury

According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for "God, eternity, the years of God which fail not."25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and "if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them."26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child's right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk. — Ross King

It is difficult to understand the behavior of most German Protestants in the first Nazi years unless one is aware of two things: their history and the influence of Martin Luther.* The great founder of Protestantism was both a passionate anti-Semite and a ferocious believer in absolute obedience to political authority. He wanted Germany rid of the Jews and when they were sent away he advised that they be deprived of "all their cash and jewels and silver and gold" and, furthermore, "that their synagogues or schools be set on fire, that their houses be broken up and destroyed ... and they be put under a roof or stable, like the gypsies ... in misery and captivity as they incessantly lament and complain to God about us" - advice that was literally followed four centuries later by Hitler, Goering and Himmler. — William L. Shirer

no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and - though only after further elaboration by Kepler - more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs — Nick Bostrom

In fact, it is known from tales brought back by missionaries that the Japanese version of The Sinner's Guide was one of the bullwarks that sustained the faith of the Japanese Catholics during two centuries of terrible persecution, when both in Europe and Japan, Japanese Christianity was believed dead. In 1865, when missionaries were again allowed into Japan, missionary Father Bernard Petitjean was astonished to find in the hills around Nagasaki thousands of Japanese Catholics who had kept the Faith, hidden but vital, without priests, for over 200 years! Immense was the joy of these faithful ones at once again having a Catholic priest among them. The Sinner's Guide had played a providential role in sustaining the Faith in their souls during that trying time. — Louis Of Granada

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries. — Boris Pasternak

Madeira is a wine like no other. It is fine wine in extremis. Heat and air, both the sworn enemies of most wines and wine makers, conspire to turn madeira into one of the most enthralling of the world's wines as well as the most resilient. Wines from the nineteenth and even the eighteenth centuries still retain an ethereal, youthful gloss, even after spending what is, in wine terms, an aeon in cask and bottle. Having gone through this extreme and often extensive ageing process, madeira is virtually indestructible. Once the cork is removed, the wine comes to no harm, even if the bottle is left on ullage for months, even for years on end. If ever there was a wine to take away with you to a desert island, this is it. — Richard Mayson

More material progress has been made during the past one hundred and fifty years under the American system of business enterprise than during all the preceding centuries in world history. This record of achievement is a challenge to those who would radically change that system. — Karl Taylor Compton

The busy 20th and 21st centuries have made Garfield's era seem remote and irrelevant, its leaders ridiculed for their very obscurity... to the generation of Americans then alive, though, their dramas, humanities, and dignity were a compelling part of daily life. For twenty years after the Civil War, America was led by a group of larger-than-life figures with clay feet who fought and raged and plied their craft with nerve and ambition while following a code of honor riddled with blind spots and inconsistencies; during that time, public involvement in politics reached levels far higher than today. Garfield held a special place: one of the most promising of his generation, shot down in his prime, martyred for taking a principled stand. — Kenneth D. Ackerman

By the time of Athelstan the country was divided into shires, hundreds and vills or townships, precisely in order to expedite taxation. The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974. The earliest of them date from the late seventh and early eighth centuries, but many of their borders lie further back in the shape of the Iron Age tribal kingdoms. So the essential continuity of England was assured. Hampshire is older than France. Other shires, like those in the midlands, were constructed later; but they are still very ancient. — Peter Ackroyd

I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries. — Julie Walters

A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'. Practically, a state of this kind is usually reached very rapidly. Theoretically, it is very often not yet an absolute equilibrium, not yet the true maximum of entropy. But then the final approach to equilibrium is very slow. It could take anything between hours, years, centuries, — Erwin Schrodinger

Liberal hostility to the traditional family helped to undermine centuries of accumulated wisdom and experience about what was best for children and adults. Far from benefiting only men, marriage confers enormous advantages on women and children as well - a fact that has been thrown into sharp relief by its breakdown over the past forty years. — Mona Charen

A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead; They followed still his crooked way And lost a hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well established precedent. — Sam Walter Foss

In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale - a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a "tortoise" would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race - the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt. — B.J. Novak

Recall that when the first presses produced copies of the Bible, the scribes who had to spend years at a time on the same work, just as it had been done for centuries, streamed out from the monasteries with quills raised in the air, decrying the work of the devil. When one of the pioneering tradesmen printed certain words in red ink to emphasize them, it was proof that he had used his own blood. That was why the printers' assistants began to be called "devils." Soon printers were threatened with burning, and some were indeed put into the fire along with their equipment. From the beginning, the creation of the modern book was viewed as the work of Satan - an attempt to usurp the word of God. — Matthew Pearl

First of all, you don't want me to get too hungry. Ever. I'm an ever worse bastard than normal and having starved for centuries, I'm not about to deprive myself again when I don't have to. Second, let me tell you something about your 'friends.' Deimos held me down while I was branded and then took me to the human realm where I was left with nothing. No clothes, no money. Not a damn thing to call my own. Hence the aforementioned starvation. A hundred years later, M'Ordant dumped my inside a Spartan prison camp and told the commander I was a traitor to their people. You don't really want to know what the Spartans did to people they thought betrayed them. D'Alerian had me put inside a Turkish prison in the fifteenth century where I was impaled after being tortured for three weeks. So you'll have to excuse me if I have a hard time feeling too sorry for them right now. At least no one's shoving a sharp spike up their asses. (Jericho) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them. — Simon Barnes

I was thinking about how free of mobs recent centuries had been: to create a mob there must be public meetings, and public meetings in our time consisted of individuals communing via the All Thing or other datasphere channels; it is hard to create mob passion when people are separated by kilometers and light-years, connected only by comm lines and fatline threads. — Dan Simmons

In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course, of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions, to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. — Yuval Noah Harari

V jerked back to the present. And for some reason didn't lie. "I'm thinking about my tattoos."
"When did you get them?"
"Almost three centuries ago."
She whistled. "God, you live that long?"
"Longer. Assuming I don't get cracked dead in a fight and you fool humans don't blow up the planet, I'll be breathing for another seven hundred years. — J.R. Ward

Better to sink with tempests raging o'er
Masts all dismantled and hull gaping wide
Than rest and rot on some unclouded shore
The idle plaything of the listless tide.

Better the grime of battle on the brow,
With grim defeat to crush thy dying hand
Than through long years of peace to tyrant bow
Or dwell captive in a strangers land.

Better the castle with beleaguered gate,
By battle's lightning shivered in a day
Than peaceful walls in pomp of sullen state,
Through centuries sinking to a dull decay.

Better resolve to win thy heart's desire,
And striving bravely, die in the endeavor
Than have the embers of some smothered fire
Lie smouldering in thy saddened soul forever. — Sam Davis

In many ways, a book is, in itself, a tiny universe. Each page is like a newly formed galaxy, fashioned from a single, pulsing thought.
A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time. — Unknown

Beholding the flash drive that may contain so many keys, intuition dawns: I've always been a butterfly trapped in Donovan's net. My heart knows Donovan and I traveled together before, yet I've never allowed myself to think of the logistics. If the more I pull back, the more I crave his enclosure, what happens if I learn my deprivation has been for centuries, or even millenniums? Is being an old soul why I have always felt and sounded older than my years? Why do
I have the passions I do? How did I become me? — Diane Rinella

And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happening that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills. — Lord Dunsany

Just be you-strong and honest. The rest falls into place if you do that. It always has. It always will. Remember that. No matter what happens over the ... centuries ahead of you, remember to be honest with yourself. And if you fail, forgive yourself. You'll make mistakes. The whole world is new, and they have so many more years in the then you. — Melissa Marr

God has not forgotten you. He will as readily order about the forces of the universe on your account as He did on Noah's. His plans for Noah were also plans for the whole world through Noah. So they are for you. He will use you for the good of the whole world if you will let Him. SELECTED We may forget; God does not! God's time is never wrong, Never too fast nor too slow; The planets move to its steady pace As the centuries come and go. Stars rise and set by that time, The punctual comets come back With never a second's variance, From the round of their viewless track. Men space their years by the sun, And reckon their months by the moon, Which never arrive too late And never depart too soon. Let us set our clocks by God's, And order our lives by His ways, And nothing can come and nothing can go Too soon or too late in our day. ANNIE JOHNSON FLINT "There are no dates in His fine leisure. — Lettie B. Cowman