Insects Quotes - Page 7

I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit--a language to use against these sparkling insects, these jets.

Mahmoud Darwish

Steel, Use, Want

Mahmoud Darwish (2013). “Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982”, p.33, Univ of California Press

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Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

Charles Darwin

Struggle, Bird, Singing

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There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.

Larry Niven

Men, Animal, Space

Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Michael Flynn (2002). “Fallen Angels”, p.232, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil?

Rachel Carson

Healthy, Matter, Soil

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.56, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.

Rachel Carson

Wings, Bird, Decision

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.127, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.

Rachel Carson

Risk, Wish, Needs

Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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A tiny fly can choke a big man.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Men, Tiny, Choke

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His Labor is a Chant - His Idleness -a Tune - Oh, for a Bee's experience Of Clovers, and of Noon!

Emily Dickinson

Experience, Tunes, Noon

Emily Dickinson, “Like Trains Of Cars On Tracks Of Plush”

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A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it -- which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.

Mark Twain

Children, Home, Boys

Mark Twain (2012). “Adventures of Tom Sawyer Companion”, p.124, BookCaps Study Guides

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People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

Charles Bukowski

Animal, People, Interesting

Charles Bukowski (2009). “Hollywood”, p.178, Canongate Books

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Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

Terry Pratchett

Girl, Running, Dog

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Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

Neil Gaiman

Way, Facts, Bees

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I craved your warmth. I hugged myself, rubbing my fingers up and down. I guess people are like insects sometimes, drawn to heat, A kind of infra-red longing.

Lucy Christopher

People, Red, Heat

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One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Dream, Morning, Book

"Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". Interview with Peter H. Stone, www.theparisreview.org. 1981.

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Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet

Mary Wollstonecraft

Wise, Men, Race

Mary Wollstonecraft (2008). “A Vindication of the Rights of Women & a Vindication of the Rights of Men”, p.186, Cosimo, Inc.

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Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

Peter Watts

Circles, Axes, Perfect

Peter Watts (2014). “Firefall”, p.193, Head of Zeus

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..."Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others’ lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine.

Elizabeth Scott

Fall, Heart, Wind

Elizabeth Scott (2010). “The Unwritten Rule”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog, the creature of a narrower sphere. You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season.

Zhuangzi

Summer, Ocean, Ice

Zhuangzi, Herbert Allen Giles (1909). “Teachings and Sayings of Chuang Tzu”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

John Updike

Mean, Eye, Space

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Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Song, Autumn, Light

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “Collected Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Delphi Classics)”, p.2052, Delphi Classics

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My grandmother lived in a universe filled with life. It was impossible for her to conceive of any creature - even the smallest insect, let alone a human being - as insignificant. In every leaf, flower, animal, and star she saw an expression of a compassionate universe, whose laws were not competition and survival of the fittest but cooperation, artistry and thrift. . . .

Eknath Easwaran

Stars, Flower, Grandmother

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Now summer is in flower and natures hum
Is never silent round her sultry bloom
Insects as small as dust are never done
Wi' glittering dance and reeling in the sun
And green wood fly and blossom haunting bee
Are never weary of their melody
Round field hedge now flowers in full glory twine
Large bindweed bells wild hop and streakd woodbine
That lift athirst their slender throated flowers
Agape for dew falls and for honey showers
These round each bush in sweet disorder run
And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun.

John Clare

Summer, Running, Sweet

John Clare, Eric Robinson, David Powell (2004). “Major Works”, p.135, Oxford University Press, USA

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From one point of view we can say that we have human bodies and are practicing the Buddha's teachings and are thus much better than insects. But we can also say that insects are innocent and free from guile, where as we often lie and misrepresent ourselves in devious ways in order to achieve our ends or better ourselves. From this perspective, we are much worse than insects.

Dalai Lama

Buddhist, Lying, Teaching

"Dzogchen: Heart Essence of the Great Perfection" by Dalai Lama, Snow Lion Publications, 2004.

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In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

Louis Agassiz

Teacher, Laughter, Teaching

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... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole world.

Henry Walter Bates

Nature, Writing, Butterfly

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