Quotes on Five

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

We used to think that you could pay attention to five to nine things at a time. We now know that's not true. That's a crazy overestimate. The conscious mind can attend to about three things at once. Trying to juggle any more than that, and you're going to lose some brainpower.

Inside every seventy-year-old is a thirty-five-year-old asking, 'What happened?

Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

Never, ever invest money that you will need prior to three to five years - minimum.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and five the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

I awoke from The Sickness at the age of forty-five, calm and sane, and in reasonably good health except for a weakened liver and the look of borrowed flesh common to all who survive The Sickness.

Your first encounter of the day has a more direct bearing on your attitude for that day than your next five encounters.

I took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I had never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamberpots. When I went back to investigate more closely, I discovered that the room had vanished. But I must keep an eye out for it. Possibly it is only accessible at five thirty in the morning. Or it may only appear at the quarter moon - or when the seeker has an exceptionally full bladder.

To some people, not caring is supposed to be cool, commenting is more interesting than doing, and everything is judged and then disposed of in, like, five minutes. I'm not interested in those kinds of people. I like the person who commits and goes all in and takes big swings and then maybe fails or looks stupid; who jumps and falls down, rather than the person who points at the person who fell, and laughs. But I do sometimes laugh when people fall down.

In his wretched life of less than twenty-seven years Abel accomplished so much of the highest order that one of the leading mathematicians of the Nineteenth Century could say without exaggeration, "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years." Asked how he had done all this in the six or seven years of his working life, Abel replied, "By studying the masters, not the pupils."

When beginning your entrepreneurial journey, acknowledge that you become a product of the five people you spend the most time with. So choose your company wisely.

I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.