What is forty?

Famous quotes containing the word forty:

“It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac’s own estimate, one has lived in vain.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)

“If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)

“Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)