Quote

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.

Clifton Fadiman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Clifton Fadiman
Age: 95 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 15
Died: 1999
Died: June 20
Intellectual
Journalist
Literary Critic
Radio Personality
Television Presenter
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Clifton Paul Fadiman
Life
Courses
Dull
Traps
Tumble
Course
Trees
Arbitrary
Calendar
Grows
Permanent
Consent
Annuals
Existence
Carry
Divides
Annual
Earth
Sun
Unlike
Calendars
Need
Wall
Drawn
Arithmetic
Consents
Needs
Grow
Birthday
Trap
Timetables
Years
Tree
Rings
Divide
Consultation

More quotes by Clifton Fadiman

Image
Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
If you want to feel at home, stay home.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
I tried to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation
Clifton Fadiman
Image
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The German mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
As between mileage and experience choose experience.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
There are two kinds of writers the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
What is a sense of humor? Surely not the ability to understand a joke. It comes rather from a residing feeling of one's own absurdity. It is the ability to understand a joke, and that the joke is on oneself.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Wine is poetry in a bottle.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Muhammad Ali: Superman Don't need no seat belt. Flight Attendant: Superman Don't need no airplane, either.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The only reason for being young is to outgrow it.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The drinking of wine seems to me to have a moral edge over many pleasures and hobbies in that it promotes love of one's neighbor.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.
Clifton Fadiman
Image
Cheese is milk's leap towards immortality.
Clifton Fadiman