Tortoise Quotes

1. "I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has. Goes to sleep all winter and doesn't eat anything more than grass as far as I know, to live all the summer. Not an interesting life perhaps, but a very peaceful one."
Author: Agatha Christie

2. "Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

3. "This commissary was a man of very repulsive mien, with a pointed nose, with yellow and salient cheek bones, with eyes small but keen and penetrating, and an expression of countenance resembling at one the polecat and the fox. His head, supported by a long and flexible neck, issued from his large black robe, balancing itself with a motion very much like that of the tortoise thrusting his head out of his shell."
Author: Alexandre Dumas

4. "In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game."
Author: Anita Brookner

5. "In fact," Eric said, as he went to the front door, "I'd throw it away entirely. Maybe burn it."He left, closing the door behind him very quietly.I knew, as sure as I knew my name, that tomorrow he would send me another coat, in a big fancy box, with a big bow on it. It would be the right size, it would be a top brand, and it would be warm.It was cranberry red, with a removable liner, a detachable hood and tortoiseshell buttons."
Author: Charlaine Harris

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

7. "The developers, if they decide to move a tortoise, have to pay the long-term costs for enhancing the areas that take care of the tortoise, and it gives us the opportunity to manage an area that is going to be protected."
Author: Gale Norton

8. "If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos."
Author: Gary William Flake

9. "I had no time to make a world of my own: I had to stay fixed like Atlas, my feet on the elephant's back and the elephant on the tortoise's back. To inquire on what the tortoise stood would be to go mad."
Author: Henry Miller

10. "Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise."
Author: Hermann Hesse

11. "My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died."There's a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, "Who told you that?" "Annabel did.""Well, it's not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world."There's a silence while I stare at Dad and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. "Richard," she moans quietly."A tortoise?" I repeat in dismay. "I'm named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?""Longevity?"
Author: Holly Smale

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

13. "In there?'She nodded.'You want us to go into the tortoise?'Another nod.'It's alive.'Another nod."
Author: Ilona Andrews

14. "Nice plan. Take the gullible outsiders, walk them around for a bit, then feed them to the giant tortoise."
Author: Ilona Andrews

15. "Giving the tortoise a little wave, I kind of felt stupid afterward for doing so. It just stuck its head back in its green and brown shell. "That's a very interesting pet.""And those are very interesting shorts." His gaze dropped. "What are they?" Leaning forward his eyes narrowed and I stiffened. "Pizza slices?"Heat swamped my cheeks. "They're ice cream cones.""Huh. I like them." Straightening, his gaze drifted up me slowly, leaving an unfamiliar wake of heat behind. "A lot."
Author: J. Lynn

16. "A gigantic tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell was glittering near the window."
Author: J.K. Rowling

17. "Love should last a lifetime. But not the lifetime of a giant tortoise. More like the lifespan of a gastrotrich."
Author: Jarod Kintz

18. "The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins."These are the ghosts of treasures ost at sea," the cook went on, "the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean. Ah! It's a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it."Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. "And what is the tale of the turtles?" He asked."Nothing; only food..."
Author: John Steinbeck

19. "May this house stand until an ant drinks the ocean and a tortoise circles the world."
Author: Jonathan Carroll

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

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

22. "She probably fell asleep and was washed away by the tortoise waves!"-Arista"
Author: Khalia Hades

23. "The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

24. "Good habits are the basic tools that will determine whether you are a tortoiseor hare in life!"
Author: Lucas Remmerswaal

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

26. "I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals."
Author: Mary Rose O'Reilley

27. "Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise."
Author: Mary Shelley

28. "It was a race between the tortoise and the hare, but the tortoise had just enough head start, and he had the magus to drag him along."
Author: Megan Whalen Turner

29. "I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?Yes.It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.Such as?Be not in haste, said the tortoise.There is nothing here but time.If you live long enough, you will see.Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?The tortoise chuckled. The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked."
Author: Patrick Jennings

30. "Let us accept the possibility that there is, at death, not an abrupt cessation of energy, rather a dispersal. This seems more than reasonable to me. Mind you, I've owned a series of old cars, and I"m used to turning off the motor only to experience a series of rumblings and explosions that would shame many a volcano. This is the sort of thing I'm conceptualizing, a kind of clunky running-on. And just as some cars are more susceptible to this behavior, so people vary in the length of time, and the force with which, their energy sputters and gasps. . . My example is overly dramatic, but it is not wholly unreasonable, and it serves to make this genetic mutation a player at the evolutionary table. You see what I'm getting at: a biologically and evolutionally sound model for the soul. (I didn't say I'd achieved it.) Let's conceive of the soul as an aura that human beings wear on their backs, cumberson as a tortoise's carapace. Some are larger than others."
Author: Paul Quarrington

31. "I eat like a tortoise eats, if you've ever seen a tortoise eating. Like some prehistoric swamp thing."
Author: R.J. Palacio

32. "We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea."
Author: Richard P. Feynman

33. "He was, she reflected, almost rudely like a tortoise; and she was glad her friend kept none as pets or they might have suspected mockery."
Author: Stella Gibbons

34. "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
Author: Stephen Hawking

35. "As the tortoise can draw in his legs, and if you strike him, not one foot comes out,"
Author: Swami Vivekananda

36. "Sept.17 (1780). When we call loudly thro' the speaking-trumpet to Timothy ( the tortoise), he does not seem to regard the noise. Sept.18. Timothy eats heartily. Oct.3. No ring-ouzels seen this autumn yet. Timothy very dull."
Author: Sylvia Townsend Warner

37. "One day a tortoise will learn how to fly."
Author: Terry Pratchett

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

39. "Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go."
Author: Terry Pratchett

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

41. "Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand.Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation -- teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience."
Author: Terry Tempest Williams

42. "How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell."
Author: Verlyn Klinkenborg

43. "There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?"
Author: Wole Soyinka

Tortoise Quotes Pictures