Top 67 Tortoise Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

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.

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?

The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead. Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof.

Winds flap the sail, tortoise and snake are silent, a great plan looms. A bridge will fly over this moat dug by heaven and be a road from north to south. We will make a stone wall against the upper river to the west and hold back steamy clouds and rain of Wu peaks. Over tall chasms will be a calm lake, and if the goddess of these mountains is not dead she will marvel at the changed world.

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.

Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education - if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon - all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.

We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading from primal superstition to final exactitude. We know that the sun is hub of our little corner of the universe, and that ties of genealogy connect all living things on our planet, because these theories assemble and explain so much otherwise disparate and unrelated information not because Galileo trained his telescope on the moons of Jupiter or because Darwin took a ride on a Galápagos tortoise.