Thousand Years Quotes

We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated.
Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, "Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China. ~ Fred Pearce

Whether you bathe in the Ganga for a thousand years or live on vegetable food for a like period, unless it helps towards the manifestation of the Self, know that it is all of no use. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old. ~ Shelagh Delaney

Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree"). ~ John McWhorter

We need to have nature back in our atmosphere. There might be a turning point of going backward - within a few thousand years we are going back to the Stone Age! There are many scenarios [with] the robot technologies: Humans no longer need to walk; machines can produce products and food and everything. You might not be able to recognize what's false and what is real. ~ Hiroshi Sugimoto

Well, the Romanies have been around for five thousand years, longer than any nation. And why? Because we know how to survive. The Aryans tried to kill us, the Persians, the Tatars, the Magyars, the Africans, the Germans, everybody. But we stay together, and we move on, and we keep one thing in mind, to survive, and that is our greatest secret. ~ Martin Cruz Smith

The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was. ~ Tim Weiner

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy. ~ Bill Nye

It was 100,000 years before we figured out what to do with fire. Imagine cavemen, sitting in front of a fire, eating raw meat for 100 thousand years. ~ Julian Casablancas

You're rich enough to sustain two houses."
"Of course I'm rich enough," Lucifer replied dryly. "I've
been alive for nearly four thousand years. There would be
serious problems if I wasn't well off enough to save this idiotic
American government six times over. ~ Fawn Routson

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

A thousand years this city has stood, now at the whim of a madman it will fall. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. ~ Jessica Khoury

She saw at last that her strange son was fired by some purpose which he would carry out or die. Seeing that, she finally currendered--the first casualty of the Revolution in Virginia. In so far as she herself realized, the sacrifice was made for George Wahington, but subconsciously she made it for his cause--just as unaware and obeying by blind instinct the laws of her nature, she had made him to begin with out of stuff that had been in the wearving a thousand years. ~ Nancy Byrd Turner

Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don't believe that.
I'm no shrink and I'm not saying I've got Marv all figured out or anything, but "crazy" just doesn't explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he's retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other. But that doesn't have the right ring to it either. No, it's more like there's nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all
except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He'd have been okay if he'd been born a couple of thousand years ago. He'd be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody's face. Or in a roman arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him.
They'd have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then. ~ Frank Miller

We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now ... won't make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain't they? ~ Larry Brown

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. They'd have no reason to come to the surface. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?It would be like a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives. ~ Peter Benchley

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation. ~ Annalee Newitz

I know the odds are against us. I know she's a siren. I know she's eaten people. I know she's five thousand years older than me. But I really like her. ~ Simon Rich

We need to remember that God is no less good to us when we find ourselves in a battle of wills with a preschooler in the checkout line at the grocery store than he was as his Son dragged a cross up a hill that Friday two thousand years ago. ~ Gloria Furman

Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child. ~ Billy Crystal

The Swimming Pool

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he's here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear her terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn't seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower, to the poor, so they won't kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what's everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel. ~ Thomas Lux

If that's the case, hurrah for the crazy people! Look, Lola, do you remember a single name, for instance, of any of the soldiers killed in the Hundred Years War? Did you ever try to find out who any of them were? No! You see? You never tried. As far as you are concerned, they are as anonymous, as indifferent, as the last atom of that paperweight, as your morning bowel movement. Get into your head, Lola, that they died fot nothing! For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous. Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours... I don't believe in future, Lola... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem: the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it. so true as of Egypt. ~ Amelia B. Edwards

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise. ~ Robert Ardrey

It looks as though it got into God's desk after school and nicked off with every single nasty toy confiscated from the fallen angels. It writhes towards me along the ceiling, various spiked parts of it clicking and clattering against the stone. It's in no hurry. It's probably waited a thousand years for some dumbass Earthman to come along and wake it up. ~ Adrian Tchaikovsky

What is a thousand years? Time is short for one who thinks, endless for one who yearns. ~ Emile Chartier

What are you doing here? (Artemis)
I wanted to thank you for what you did tonight, but as I considered that, it dawned on me that you have never once in eleven thousand years done anything for me for free. The sheer fear factor of that realization alone has made me come seeking you. So what gives? (Acheron) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

perform the equivalent of all human thought over the last ten thousand years (assumed at ten billion human brains for ten thousand years) in ten microseconds.64 If we examine the "Exponential Growth of Computing" chart (p. 70), we see that this amount of computing is estimated to be available for one thousand dollars by 2080. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Even after four thousand years, I could still learn important life lessons. For instance: never go shopping with a satyr.
Finding the store took forever, because Grover kept getting sidetracked. He stopped to chat with a yucca. He gave directions to a family of ground squirrels. He smelled smoke and led us on a chase across the desert until he found a burning cigarette someone had dropped onto the road.
"This is how fires start," he said, then responsibly disposed of the cigarette butt by eating it.
I didn't see anything within a mile radius that could have caught fire. I was reasonably sure rocks and soil were not flammable, but I never argue with people who eat cigarettes. ~ Rick Riordan

I never bore people I haven't known for at least a thousand years. ~ J.D. Salinger

I shivered. Of course, that was the whole point of the re-enactment, that we ourselves became the ghosts, learning to walk the land as they walked it two thousand years ago, to tend our fire as they tended theirs and hope that some of their thoughts, their way of understanding the world, would follow the dance of muscle and bone. To do it properly, I thought, we would almost have to absent ourselves from ourselves, leaving our actions, our re-enactions, to those no longer there. Who are the ghosts again, us or our dead? Maybe they imagined us first, maybe we were conjured out of the deep past by other minds. ~ Sarah Moss

Then Er Lang was looking at me ruefully. "You have taken at least fifty years of my life!"
I was stricken. "Take it back!"
"I can't. But fortunately, my life span is many times yours."
"How long can a dragon live?"
"A thousand years, if he is lucky. Not all of us are, of course." He raised an eyebrow.
"I'm sorry." I couldn't look him in the eye. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the strong line of his throat. If he had given me blood, I would surely have killed him. But Er Lang was struggling to sit up.
"I should have stopped you sooner. Though I now understand why men succumb to ghosts." He spoke lightly, but my ears blazed with mortification.
"You were the one who put your tongue in my mouth!" I blurted out, regretting it instantly. To talk about other people's tongues was the worst, revealing the depths of my inexperience. And yet, the memory of his made me shiver and burn, as though I had a fever. It hadn't been like this with Tian Bai; it was easy to understand where I stood with him. But he had been courting me, whereas Er Lang was an entirely different commodity. We did not have that sort of relationship, I reminded myself.
But he merely gave me a wry glance. "I was a little carried away."
"Thank you," I said at last. I realized it was the first time I had thanked him formally. ~ Yangsze Choo

All these souls, after they have passed away a thousand years, are summoned by the divine ones in great array, to the lethean river ... In this way they become forgetful of the former earthlife, and re-visit the vaulted realms of the world, willing to return again into living bodies. ~ Virgil

Leaves will fall, cold will creep in
A circle of life that ends where it begins
It may take a thousand years and a thousand poems penned
But my hair will someday gray and my back will bend
Then my shadow will join my body in the earth once again.
I know not the way, or even the when
Or who chooses that day we're called away to ascend
But you bathed me in your bravery and forgave me my sins
You made a home in your heart for mine to live in
And in return, my friend, this poem is my oath that a river of love will run through it until the very end. ~ Ryan Winfield

Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the wayThat's another piece of garbage. What the hell's it based on? We couldn't've come from anything-fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don't believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren't monkeys changing into men now? It's absolute garbage. It's absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists. ~ John Lennon

I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years ~ Isadora Duncan

How could I not love him, after that? That is not to say that I approved of all he did, or much enjoyed the company of the man that he became ... but every little girl needs a big brother to protect her. Tywin was big even when he was little." She gave a sigh. "Who will protect us now?"
Jaime kissed her cheek. "He left a son."
"Aye, he did. That is what I fear the most, in truth."
That was a queer remark. "Why should you fear?"
"Jaime," she said, tugging on his ear, "sweetling, I have known you since you were a babe at Joanna's breast. You smile like Gerion and fight like Tyg, and there's some of Kevan in you, else you would not wear that cloak ... but Tyrion is Tywin's son, not you. I said so once to your father's face, and he would not speak to me for half a year. Men are such thundering great fools. Even the sort who come along once in a thousand years. ~ George R R Martin

Let not the weight of a thousand years, Stain your marbled skin I pray, And let not the weight of words ever hurt, Your delicate wine bled lips. Wear that hallowed smile as your eternal crown, And let it graze and let it flourish, Let it heal my desolate heart morose, Come and baptize all of what is left of me, Before I wear the silence in black and white… ~ Piyush Rohankar

She knew her husband would never stray, so highly did he value that which he'd waited nearly six thousand years to know, so precious was it to him: love. She knew he would be there with her until the very end, that he would cherish each wrinkle, every line in her face, because in the final analysis they were not a negation of life but an affirmation of a life well lived. Proof positive of laughter and tears, of joy and grief, of passion, of living. ~ Karen Marie Moning

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal. ~ Norman O. Brown

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist. ~ Frans De Waal

He had murdered any illlusion of Alex Remington. The golden pendant had been replaced by a spiked dog collar, and he was wearing a black T-shirt that hugged his form and showed off the many designs on his arms: Fenris on the right wrist, and Echidna, the greek mother of monsters, high on his left arm. The norse world serpent was wrapped around his left wrist, and a new design had recently been added: Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the gates of Hades. The world serpent was partially obscurred by a black leather knife sheath, which held a silver knife Aubrey had taken from a vampire hunter a few thousand years earlier.
His hair was slightly touseled, as if he'd been running, and a few strands fell across his face.
Looking at him now, Jessica couldn't imagine how she had ever mistaken him for a human. But illusion was Aubrey's art. And it was simple to fool people who expected nothing else.
For the moment, Aubrey appeared to be exactly what he was: stunning, michievous, and completely deadly all at once ~ Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. ~ Ray Bradbury

There is no better recreation for the mind than the study of the ancient classics. Take any one of them into your hand, be it only for half an hour, and you will feel yourself refreshed, relieved, purified, ennobled, strengthened; just as if you had quenched your thirst at some pure spring. Is this the effect of the old language and its perfect expression, or is it the greatness of the minds whose works remain unharmed and unweakened by the lapse of a thousand years? Perhaps both together. But this I know. If the threatened calamity should ever come, and the ancient languages cease to be taught, a new literature shall arise, of such barbarous, shallow and worthless stuff as never was seen before. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you. ~ Daniel Quinn

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

I try to build the things so that they're fairly indestructible. I've learned from my mistakes and some of those units, even if human life disappears from the planet, will still be recognizable a thousand years from now abandoned somewhere in the woods. ~ John Lindsay

Hyacinth bean and papayas, long vines, deep roots. Palm trees outside the garden walls, with deep roots, stand a thousand years. ~ Lisa See

Some People, we know in a heartbeat. Others, we'll never know, even if we speak to them for a thousand years. ~ Nalini Singh

A small sample of the oxygen molecules from any breath that anybody took within the past few thousand years is near certain to be in the next breath you take. ~ David Bodanis

Beauty - what is beauty, forsooth? Form and color; that is, surface only. Fortune - what is fortune? Nothing is ever a pleasure or a real profit to him who has to labour for it. Truth - you die in the pursuit, and the sea beats the beach as it did a thousand years ago. The stolid are alone happy. ~ Richard Jefferies

And on that day when my strength is failing; the end draws near and my time has come. Still my soul will sing Your praise unending ten thousand years and then forevermore ~ Matt Redman

They age," Tink said. "And die like humans. I'm a brownie. Therefore, I do not need to feed. I just age very, very, very slowly."
"I'm guessing you're probably still in your toddler years then," Ren muttered from up front.
Tink snorted. "I'll have you know that I'm two hundred years old."
My eyes widened as I looked over at him. "What?"
Faye laughed softly. "Brownies can live to be over a thousand years old. In human years, he's barely twenty."
Ren snickered.
Tink's eyes narrowed. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Water sluices away soap and grime, even some of the shame comes with it. If she were to scrub for a thousand years she would not be clean, but she is too tired to care and she has grown accustomed to scars she cannot scour away. The sweat, the alcohol, the humid salt of semen and degradation, these she can cleanse. It is enough. She is too tired to scrub harder. Too hot and too tired, always.
At the end of her rinsing, she is happy to find a little water left in the bucket. She dips one ladleful and drinks it, gulping. And then in a wasteful, unrestrained gesture, she upends the bucket over her head in one glorious cathartic rush. In that moment, between the touch of the water, and the splash as it pools around her toes, she is clean. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Then Chameroy spoke. 'You always put the blame on opium, but as I see it the case of Freneuse is much more complicated. Him, an invalid? No - a character from the tales of Hoffmann! Have you never taken the trouble to look at him carefully? That pallor of decay; the twitching of his bony hands, more Japanese than chrysanthemums; the arabesque profile; that vampiric emaciation - has all of that never given you cause to reflect? In spite of his supple body and his callow face Freneuse is a hundred thousand years old. That man has lived before, in ancient times under the reigns of Heliogabalus, Alexander IV and the last of the Valois. What am I saying? That man is Henri III himself. I have in my library an edition of Ronsard - a rare edition, bound in pigskin with metal trimmings - which contains a portrait of Henri engraved on vellum. One of these nights I will bring the volume here to show you, and you may judge for yourselves. Apart from the ruff, the doublet and the earrings, you would believe that you were looking at the Due de Freneuse. As far as I'm concerned, his presence here inevitably makes me ill - and so long as he is present, there is such an oppression, such a heaviness... ~ Jean Lorrain

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. ~ Theodore Parker

From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia ... could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Live not one's life as though one had a thousand years, but live each day as the last. ~ Marcus Aurelius

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

We can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about morality and the human well-being - a conversation in which we avail ourselves of all scientific insights and philosophical arguments that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse - or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible. ~ Sam Harris

A condemned man who, at the hour of death, says or thinks that if the alternative were offered him of existing somewhere, on a height of rock or some narrow elevation, where only his two feet could stand, and round about him the ocean, perpetual gloom, perpetual solitude, perpetual storm, to remain there standing on a yard of surface for a lifetime, a thousand years, eternity! - rather would he live thus than die at once? Only live, live, live! - no matter how, only live! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let us remember that the Christmas heart is a giving heart, a wide open heart that thinks of others first. The birth of the baby Jesus stands as the most significant event in all history, because it has meant the pouring into a sick world of the healing medicine of love which has transformed all manner of hearts for almost two thousand years ... Underneath all the bulging bundles is this beating Christmas heart. ~ George Matthew Adams

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire."
The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird.
"Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end. ~ Anthony Doerr

No matter when you had been to this spot before, a thousand years ago or a hundred thousand years ago, or if you came back to it a million years from now, you would see some different things each time, but the scene would be generally the same. ~ Neil Armstrong

Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years. ~ Gore Vidal

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it'll be told for a thousand years.
"But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none."
That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.
We're trying to make our life into a fairy tale. ~ Derek Sivers

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today. ~ Carson McCullers

It would be superfluous to mention more who, though others deemed them the happiest of men, have expressed their loathing for every act of their years, and with their own lips have given true testimony against themselves; but by these complaints they changed neither themselves nor others. For when they have vented their feelings in words, they fall back into their usual round. Heaven knows! such lives as yours, though they should pass the limit of a thousand years, will shrink into the merest span; your vices will swallow up any amount of time. The space you have, which reason can prolong, although it naturally hurries away, of necessity escapes from you quickly; for you do not seize it, you neither hold it back, nor impose delay upon the swiftest thing in the world, but you allow it to slip away as if it were something superfluous and that could be replaced. ~ Seneca.

For several thousand years man has been in contact with animals whose character and habits have been deformed by domestication. He has ended by believing that he understands them. All he means by this is that he is able to rely on certain reflex actions which he himself has implanted in them. He will flatter himself at times on the grasp of animal psychology which has brought him the love of the dog and the purr of the cat; and on the strength of such assumptions he approaches the beasts of the jungle. The old tag about nature being an open book is just not true. What nature offers on a first examination may appear to be simple but it is never as simple as it appears. ~ Hans Brick

When on a Sunday morning we hear the old bells ring out, we ask ourselves, "Is it possible! This is done on account of a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was the Son of God. The proof of such an assertion is wanting". ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Twinkle Twinkle little star.
You are nothing.
You've been dead for a thousand years. ~ Linda Barry

... Ending a conflict is not so simple, not just calling it off and coming home. Because the price for that kind of peace could be a thousand years of darkness for generation's Viet Nam borned. ~ Ronald Reagan

But rituals turn us all into fucking idiots. Like those birds that sleep with their heads facing backwards because their ancestors slept with their heads under their wings. Plutarch says carrying new wives across thresholds is stupid because we don't remember that it refers to the rape of the Sabine women - and that's fucking Plutarch, two thousand years ago. We still draw the Reaper with a scythe. We should draw him driving a John Deere for Archer Daniels Midland. ~ Josh Bazell

Any beings advanced enough to traverse interstellar distances are at least a thousand years beyond our technical level. Spending gobs of time examining our missiles is equivalent to sending the Air Force back to the Middle Ages and insisting they examine the chain mail factories. ~ Seth Shostak

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind. ~ Richard Rohr

But Harrowhark - Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years - Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die. ~ Tamsyn Muir

You think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, his god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years
hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe. ~ Carl Sagan

If that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years. ~ Michael Herr

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease ... ~ Richard Powers

Researches still don't have an explanation for the differnece between the sizes of dogs' and wolves' brains - or for why every species of domesticated animal, from ducks and geese to horses and pigs, also has a smaller brain than its wild ancestor. The reason or reasons domestication always leads to smaller brains are hotly debated; but the effects are universal. Anthropologists have documented the same change in Homo sapiens: the brains of modern humans have shrunk about 10 percent over the last ten thousand years. ~ Virginia Morell

More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil. ~ Reza Aslan

Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence. ~ Seth Shostak

Guilt is a Jewish invention improved upon by Christians for the last two thousand years. ~ Rita Mae Brown

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

The key to ministry in any and every context, both now and for the last two thousand years, is missionary flexibility. ~ Darrin Patrick

In a moment we lost our minds hereand lay our spirits down.Today we lived a thousand years,all we have is now. ~ Edward Kowalczyk

Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god? ~ Nawal El Saadawi

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing. ~ Paul Cezanne

Right now if this preacher died he would go to heaven. Not because I spent years in the jungles and the Andes Mountains of Peru. Not because of piety, devotion or bible study. Not because of denominational affiliation, baptism, or participation in the Lord's supper. If I died right now, I would go to heaven because two thousand years ago the Son of God shed His blood for this wretched man. And that is my hope. ~ Paul Washer

The German poet Goethe once said that "he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." I don't want you to end up in such a sad state. I will do what I can to acquaint you with your historical roots. It is the only way to become a human being. It is the only way to become more than a naked ape. It is the only way to avoid floating in a vacuum. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Forty thousand years of evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of human potential. ~ David Koepp

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Mad, in exasperation, cried out to the unseen force, "Why did you summon us? There must be a reason. Tell us." She heard a dreamlike voice.
"You are Stargirls." The voice paused, letting the fog and confusion of their nightmare to lift.
Lyn found her voice, "But why us?"
"You are the chosen ones by prophecy; you have proven your worthiness. A time warp brought you here. The one you opened was no accident. It was left a hundred thousand years ago just for you. Your Star training as children has prepared you well. You are ready for the next stage in your evolution. ~ Linden Morningstar

Pines a thousand years old. Every year they must go farther for them: they recede, like beavers and Indians, before the white man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Has God designated any one person here on earth to speak with final authority about Him? No - the one Man who could do that lived two thousand years ago, and we crucified Him! ~ Billy Graham

Were you somebody different a thousand years ago? Will you be somebody different a thousand years from now? What is this One Self that is forever your own deepest being? Must you believe the lies of time? Must you swallow the insanity that One Spirit does not exist? Can you show me your Original Face, of which there is One and Only One in all the entire World? ~ Ken Wilber