Ants Quotes
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It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
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More Ants Quotes
The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants.
isoroku yamamoto— Statement in opposition of the planned construction of the Yamato class battleships, as quoted in Scraps of paper: the disarmament treaties between the world wars (1989) by Harlow A. Hyde. In this statement, Yamamoto implies that even the most powerful battleships can be sunk by a huge swarm of carrier planes. This remark also proved prophetic as both Yamato and Musashi would be sunk by overwhelming air attacks.
An elephant can trumpet and shake the earth but not the self-possession of the ants who hold it.
— Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, 24 March 1968.
Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.
william carlos williams— 1921Sour Grapes,'Overture to a Dance of Locomotives'.
I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
karen blixen— As quoted in Voices: A Memoir (1983) by Frederic Prokosch
Give up this dry discussion, this hodge-podge of philosophy. Who has been able to know God by reasoning? Even sages like Suka and Vyasa are at best like big ants trying to carry away a few grains of sugar from a large hea
sarada devi— Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda. Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations. pp. 188-189.
We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.
u. g. krishnamurti— Ch. 4: You Invent Your Reality
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,If juster battles are enacted nowBetween the ants upon this hummock's crown?
Henry David Thoreau— The Summer Rain, st. 3
If we were created in God's image, then when God was a child he smushed fire ants with his fingertips and avoided tough questions.
buddy wakefield— "Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars"
ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.
lewis thomas— "Antaeus in Manhattan"
Wonderful theory, wrong species. (On Marxism, which he considered more suited to ants than to humans.)
e. o. wilson— [1]
Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, and the stars themselves are scattered no more widely than the seed of Adam, even then we shall still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?
— Arthur C. Clarke, We'll Never Conquer Space (1960)
We see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.
Francis Bacon— Francis Bacon, Historia Vitæ et Mortis.
I never kill insects. If I see ants or spiders in the room, I pick them up and take them outside. Karma is everything.
Holly valance— Australian actress, singer, and model
Great God of the ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel.
karel Čapek— The Insect Play
ants never sleep.
ralph waldo emerson— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Chapter IV.
Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.
john ralston saul— "Myrmecophaga jubata"
Fifteen minutes out of Mexico City for Tokyo a passenger aboard a 747 screamed that he was being eaten by red-hot ants, and managed to open the emergency door at 23,000 feet. He had been to the washroom and drunk from the faucet there before takeoff. It was, after all, labeled DRINKING WATER.
john brunner— July “BLOWBACK”
It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?
— Henry David Thoreau, letter to Harrison Blake (16 November 1857).
Give up this dry discussion, this hodge-podge of philosophy. Who has been able to know God by reasoning? Even sages like Suka and Vyasa are at best like big ants trying to carry away a few grains of sugar from a large hea
— Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda. Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations. pp. 188-189.
