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51  QUOTES

1 " No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5.3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.”4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank.5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13.6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14.7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15.8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil.9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19.10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961.11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936.12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 2313) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 2414) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 2818) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions.27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon.28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote " The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" , and 49 years old when he wrote " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out.33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote " The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out.35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa.36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president.37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels.38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote " The Cat in the Hat" .40) Chesley " Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President "

2 " I don’t ever remember being afraid of “oldness”.

There are things I miss about being younger - chiefly the ability to pull all-nighters and keep working and working well; and being smiled at by girls I didn’t know who thought I was cute; and I wish I had the eyesight I had even five years ago… but that stuff feels pretty trivial.

I’m happier than I’ve been at any time in my life these days. I have a wonderful wife whom I adore, watched three amazing kids grow into two delightful adults and my favourite teenager, an astonishing number of grand life experiences, I’ve made art I’m proud of, I have real, true, glorious friends, and I’ve been able to do real good for things I care about, like freedom of speech, like libraries.

Sometimes I’ll do something like An Evening With Neil and Amanda, or the 8 in 8 project, and completely surprise myself.

I miss friends who have died, but then, I’m glad that time gave them to me, to befriend, even for a while, and that I was alive to know them. I knew Douglas Adams, and I knew Roger Zelazny, and I knew John M Ford, and I knew Diana Wynne Jones… do you know how lucky that makes me?

Ah, I’m rabbiting on, and I sound a bit more Pollyannaish than I’m intending to sound: I know the downside of age and the downside of time, and I am sure that the view from age 51 is not the view from age 71.

I wish the time hadn’t gone so fast, though. And sometimes I wish I’d enjoyed it more on the way, and worried about it less. "

Neil Gaiman

6 " Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one. "

Richard Dawkins , The God Delusion