Swarms Quotes
More Swarms Quotes
"I do not know whether behind appearances there lives and moves a secret essence superior to me. Nor do I ask; I do not care. I create phenomena in swarms, and paint with a full palette a gigantic and gaudy curtain before the abyss. Do not say, "Draw the curtain that I may see the painting." The curtain is the painting.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, in ?. Salvatores dei [Ascesis : The Saviors of God] (1923) translated by Kimon Friar as The Saviors of God : Spiritual Exercises (1960), The Preparation : First Duty
I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.
Olaf Stapledon— Ch.I The Earth, 1. The Starting Point p.11
Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs...have usurped a large part of the soil.
william cobbett— Political Register (21 December 1816), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 31.
The legends of fieldwork locate all important sites deep in inaccessible jungles inhabited by fierce beasts and restless natives, and surrounded by miasmas of putrefaction and swarms of tsetse flies. (Alternative models include the hundredth dune after the death of all camels, or the thousandth crevasse following the demise of all sled dogs.)
stephen jay gould— p. 65 (Wonderful Life (1989))
With silver drops the mead yet spread for ruth, In active games of nimbleness and strength, Where we did strain, trained with swarms of youth, Our tender limbs that yet shot up in length. The secret groves, which oft we made resound Of pleasant plaint, and of our ladies' praise; Recording oft what grace each one had found, What hope of speed, what dread of long delays.
howard, henry, earl of surrey— Line 21 (Prisoned in Windsor, He Recounteth his Pleasure there Passed)
Why, you might read two sonnets, ere they reach To where the hurrying freshnesses aye preach A natural sermon o’er their pebbly beds; Where swarms of minnows show their little heads, Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams, To taste the luxury of sunny beams Temper’d with coolness.
john keats— "I Stood Tiptoe", l. 72.
Generally speaking there is more wit than talent in this world. Society swarms with witty people who lack talent.
— Comte de Rivarol, on Mme. de Staël.
