Forty Years

Famous quotes containing the words forty years, forty and/or years:

    When Prince William [later King William IV] was at Cork in 1787, an old officer ... dined with him, and happened to say he had been forty years in the service. The Prince with a sneer asked what he had learnt in those forty years. The old gentleman justly offended, said, “Sir, I have learnt, when I am no longer fit to fight, to make as good a retreat as I can” —and walked out of the room.
    Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

    Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)

    The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in years ... there is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.
    Stefan Zweig (18811942)