These Turtle quotes will inspire you.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging Turtle quotes, Turtle sayings, and Turtle proverbs.
Inspirational Turtle Quotes
- “And the turtles, of course…all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.” ~ Dr. Seuss
- “Do not let fear confine your life Inside a shell of doubt; A turtle never moves until His head is sticking out.” ~ Charles Ghigna , Turtle quotes about life
- “Take a walk with a turtle. And behold the world in pause.” ~ Bruce Feiler
- “I don’t want to live in a world where I could say to my daughter, ‘There used to be turtles that swam in the ocean.'” ~ Angela Kinsey
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“If a turtle doesn’t have a shell, is he homeless or naked?” ~ George Carlin
- “Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.” ~ James Bryant Conant
- “If a problem looks difficult, relax. If it looks impossible, relax even more. Then begin encouraging small changes, putting just enough pressure on yourself to move one turtle step forward. Then rest, savor, celebrate. Then step again. You’ll find that slow is fast, gentle is powerful, and stillness moves mountains.” ~ Martha Beck
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“I learn as much from a turtle as from a religious text.” ~ Dalai Lama
- “I want to meet the man who saw a turtle and said, “People will LOVE the ninja version of that.”” ~ Jonah Hill
- “Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: You won’t be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you.” ~ Ajahn Chah
- “Like the turtle, you need to stick your neck out to make progress.” ~ Anna Olson
- “Turtles remind us that the way to heaven is through the earth. In Mother Earth is all that we need. She will care for us, protect us, and nurture us, as long as we do the same for her. For that to happen, we must slow down and heighten our sensibilities. We must see the connection to all things. Just as the turtle cannot separate itself from its shell, neither can we separate ourselves from what we do to the Earth.” ~ Ted Andrews
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“All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “It’s okay to play turtle for a while, as long as you don’t get too fond of your shell.” ~ Eileen Wilks
- “Retain a calm heart, sit like a turtle, walk swiftly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog” ~ Li Ching-Yuen , Positive Turtle quotes
- “We don’t even know if we’re in this room. We could be in a turtle’s dream in outer space.” ~ Danny DeVito
- “Be like the turtle. If he didn’t stick his neck out, he wouldn’t get anywhere at all.” ~ Harvey Mackay
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“Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.” ~ Alex Haley
- “Pride of one’s work is not improper, unladylike, or vain. We can all take a lesson from the sea turtle. She does not travel thousands of miles or risk all for her ego. She has an instinct for greatness — one that I believe is found in all living creatures.” ~ Mary Alice
- “You are absolutely free to describe me as a turtle or something.” ~ Paul Giamatti
- “If the road is beautiful, walk the road slowly; be a turtle, be a snail and even better than this: Stop walking; live the road fully!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“Turtle has just one plan at a time, and every cell buys into it.” ~ Ted Kooser
- “Turtles have always been my sigil, I suppose. When I was a kid, growing up in Bayonne, NJ, I lived in a federal housing project, and we were not allowed to have a dog or cats. The only pets I could have were turtles. So, I had an entire toy castle filled with dime-store turtles. I gave them all names, and since they were living in a toy castle, I decided they were all knights and kings and I made up stories about how they killed each other and betrayed each other, and fought for the kingdom. So, Game of Thrones actually began with turtles. I decided later to recast it with actual human beings.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “Watch the turtle. He only moves forward by sticking his neck out.” ~ Lou Gerstner
- “Perhaps I am the turtle, able to live simply anywhere, even underwater for short periods, with my home on my back.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut
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“We could all be in a turtle’s dream, in outer space!” ~ Frank Reynolds
- “Move at a snail’s pace or walk with the speed of a turtle or run like a rabbit! Just move; forget about the speed and just move ahead!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan , Turtle quotes rabbit, snail
- “Warren is one of the best learning machines on this earth. The turtles who outrun the hares are learning machines. If you stop learning in this world, the world rushes right by you.” ~ Charlie Munger
- “I am now a turtle. Virtually everything I own is on my back and suffice it to say I am one ton lighter and therefore 2,000 pounds happier. All houses are gone.” ~ Bobby Darin
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“Just like a turtle, we only make progress if we stick our neck out.” ~ James Bryant Conant
- “You want to talk? Fine. Talk. Tell me something you’ve never told anybody else.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Turtles have the second-largest brains of any animal on the planet.’ It took Isabel only a second to process this. ‘No, they don’t.’ ‘I know that’s why I’ve never told anybody that before.” ~ Maggie Stiefvater
- “You know the sultans used to light their garden parties with turtles? They’d put candles on their backs and let them wander around. Hundreds of them.” ~ Joseph Kanon
- “As true as steel, as plantage to the moon, As sun today, at turtle to her mate, As iron to adamant, as earth to center.” ~ William Shakespeare
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“The turtle couldn’t help us.” ~ Stephen King
- “Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time tells the story of a cosmologist whose speech is interrupted by a little old lady who informs him that the universe rests on the back of a turtle. Ah, yes, madame, the scientist replies, but what does the turtle rest on? The old lady shoots back: You can’t trick me, young man. It’s nothing but turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.” ~ George Will
- “God ultimately raises up leaders for one primary reason: His glory. He shows His power in our weakness. He demonstrates His wisdom in our folly. We are all like a turtle on a fence post. If you walk by a fence post and see a turtle on top of it, then you know someone came by and put it there. In the same way, God gives leadership according to His good pleasure.” ~ Matt Chandler
- “There is an Indian story — at least I heard it as an Indian story — about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? ‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down” ~ Clifford Geertz
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“Who are you and what have you done with my brother?” ~ Stephenie Meyer
- “It’s OK to do cute little things like kissing a turtle, but you can’t kiss another person because he’s a different color? Give me a break. And you have to remember, I’m from Dallas, Texas.” ~ Aaron Spelling
- “But then I think about my sister and what a shell-less turtle she was and how she wanted me to be one too. C’mon, Lennie, she used to say to me at least ten times a day. C’mon Len. And that makes me feel better like it’s her life rather than her death that is now teaching me how to be, who to be.” ~ Jandy Nelson
- “What strength belongs to every plant and animal in nature. The tree or the brook has no duplicity, no pretentiousness, no show. It is, with all its might and main, what it is, and makes one and the same impression and effect at all times. All the thoughts of a turtle are turtle’s, and of a rabbit, rabbits. But a man is broken and dissipated by the giddiness of his will; he does not throw himself into his judgments; his genius leads him one way but ‘t is likely his trade or politics in quite another.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“I’ve got nine dogs, eight birds, turtles, fish, and I had wallabies at one point.” ~ Gloria Estefan
- “Reeling and Writhing of course, to begin with,’ the Mock Turtle replied, ‘and the different branches of arithmetic-ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife” ~ John Cornyn , Turtle quotes children
- “In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.” ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
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“And when you look at the Turtle’s movie there is something there, definitely something there.” ~ Eddie Campbell
- “Gypsy was the name my brother gave a pet turtle he had. I always thought it was so peculiar.” ~ Joel Hodgson
- “I actually think I’m more of a turtle than Verne is. Where Verne is up on two legs and moving at full speed and doesn’t pull his head into the shell very often, I in reality was five or ten minutes later to every recording session.” ~ Garry Shandling
- “Look, I admit you seem like a decent person. For all I know you stop and move turtles out of the road whenever you see one to keep someone from running it over. But this turtle is tired of having its guts spattered on the pavement while other people drive right over him. I just want to scrape myself up and hide in the woods, okay? (Aiden)” ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon
- “Be faithful in all your exercises of piety and virtue; be always resigned; be satisfied, in the superior part of your soul, to taste, without relish, the contentment of doing God’s will. Thus after the winter, the spring will come, with its flowers, and you will hear the voice of the turtle-dove in this land.” ~ Paul of the Cross
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“So a lorry-load of tortoises crashed into a train-load of terrapins, I thought “That’s a turtle disaster”.” ~ Tommy Cooper
- “Wow. Who would want a fish for a pet when they could have a turtle?!” ~ Christopher Paul Curtis
- “I remember the will said, ‘May God thy gold refine.’ That must be from the Bible.” “Shakespeare,” Turtle said. All quotations were either from the Bible or Shakespeare.” ~ Ellen Raskin , Turtle quotes God
- “On my door is a cartoon of two turtles. One says, ‘Sometimes I would like to ask why he allows poverty, famine, and injustice when he could do something about it.’ The other turtle says ‘I am afraid that God might ask me the same question.'” ~ Peter Kreeft
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“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.” ~ Janet Fitch
- “Hear the mellow wedding bells, Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! From the molten golden notes, And all in tune What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle-dove that listens while she gloats On the moon!” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “And how many hours a day did you do lessons?’ said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject. Ten hours the first day,’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘nine the next, and so on.’ What a curious plan!’ exclaimed Alice. That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked: ‘because they lessen from day to day.” ~ Lewis Carroll
- “Now you see,’ said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, ‘why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.” ~ Amy Tan
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“Rabbits are played. Nowadays it’s all about the turtles. Tell them it’s a ninja, they’ll freak.” ~ Etgar Keret
- “When this is over…we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.” ~ Jodi Picoult
- “Re. the Caribbean Conservation Corporation
Everybody in the organization has subscribed to the original concept that its most important attributes are a single-minded resistance to any distraction from the central aim of keeping watch over the Tortuguero nesting colony and a determination to make it the most thoroughly studied sea turtle population in the world.” ~ Archie Carr -
“The beach is in our blood. Everyone in our family returns to the beach instinctively, just like the sea turtles.” ~ Sandy Archibald
- “Turtles hate heights. They don’t even like being a few feet off the ground. It’s the main reason they have resisted evolution for so long-fear of heights. Turtle thinking goes thus: Sure, first our scales turn into feathers and the next thing you know we’re flying and chirping and perching on trees. We’ve seen it happen. Thanks, but we’re staying right here in the mud where we belong. You’re not going to see us flying full-tilt boogie into a sliding glass door.” ~ Christopher Moore
- “There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labor which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.” ~ Walter Benjamin
- “Nothing is more important than saving … the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.” ~ James Lee
Summary: Turtle, (order Testudines), any reptile with a body encased in a bony shell, including tortoises.
