Whales Quotes - Page 11

• The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.

  James Lovelock

  Atmosphere, Viruses, Needs

  James Lovelock, J. E. Lovelock (2000). “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth”, p.9, Oxford Paperbacks

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• I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.

  James Lovelock

  Wise, Thinking, Our World

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• I attempt to surf. Im not as good as anyone else in the water. Im more like a beached whale. I just hang out on my board. I can ride, but I get too nervous unless I go with my boyfriend or my trainer. There are too many burly men out there!

  Olesya Rulin

  Men, Water, My Boyfriend

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• I'm beginning to feel that the real endangered species on planet earth are not the whales and the elephants but those of us who can laugh at the world and ourselves. ... I fear the dry turn of the American mind, this focus on the literal, as much as I fear our capacity for self-destruction. We've become hagridden by facts, obsessed with product instead of process. Where's the energetic wit, the looney outlook, the frivolity, the lightness of comforting laughter? It has become fashionable to know and unfashionable to feel, and you can't really laugh if you can't feel.

  Rita Mae Brown

  Laughter, Real, Humor

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• The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous; but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.

  Thomas Paine

  Ideas, Miracle, Religion

  Thomas Paine (2016). “THE AGE OF REASON - Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Including “The Life of Thomas Paine”): Deistic Critique of Bible and Christian Church”, p.46, e-artnow

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• Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

  Florence King

  Reading, Cutting, Style

  Florence King (1990). “Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye”, p.168, Macmillan

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• You ought to try eating raw oysters in a restaurant with every eye focused upon you - it makes you feel as if the creatures were whales, your fork a derrick and your mouth Mammouth Cave.

  Lillian Russell

  Eye, Oysters, Trying

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• Culture, which by definition serves no purpose, has now found a role as the consort of business. Right off the bat we have a beached whale, since there is nothing that disdains culture as much as business does. ... In fact, 'corporate culture' is nothing more than the crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.

  Corinne Maier

  Business, People, Stupidity

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• Anyhow, there simply isnt enough room in the museums Fishes Hall, so weve decided to pretend to the public that a whale is actually a mammal without any legs. Its pathetically ridiculous-I mean to say, just look at the thing, its a gigantic fish if I ever saw one-but mums the word! In my experience the public will believe just about anything, so long as you write it down on a little piece of card.

  Gideon Defoe

  Believe, Mean, Writing

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• The rewards we get by being those weird guys going against the grain to me are way more massive than selling a million billion records. I like climbing mountains or going on undersea dives for whales and stuff like that.

  Lupe Fiasco

  Climbing, Guy, Mountain

  Interview with Joseph Hooper, www.elle.com. April 15, 2009.

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• So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

  Wallace Stevens

  Imagination, Brain, World

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.74, Vintage

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• Eventually I had so many little melodies and ideas that, you know, that they were all songs to me and I threw in a few cover songs like Enya's "Watermark," Bach, and my dad's song, "Song for the Whales."

  Petra Haden

  Song, Dad, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Love, Life, Sports

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• What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

  Annie Dillard

  Differences, Blue, Trying

  Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.66, Canongate Books

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• I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

  Linus Pauling

  Science, Animal, Race

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."

  Alistair Cooke

  Beach, Son, Golf

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• This isn't a hunt that's going to kill just four or five gray whales. The repercussions of this will have an effect on tens of thousands of whales that will be killed by the Japanese and Norwegians.

  Paul Watson

  Animal, Four, Gray

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• Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

  Edmund Burke

  Europe, Spain, Coast

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• Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Sex, Children, Women

  Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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• America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they'd be smaller then these.

  Simon Hoggart

  Hero, Blue, America

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• I'm not someone who can lie on a beach and do nothing. I am not sure what you are supposed to do, so I get bored. I prefer to have a purpose, such as going to Alaska to see orca whales.

  Miranda Richardson

  Beach, Lying, Alaska

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• Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.

  Spider Robinson

  Fun, Ideas, Interesting

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• Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

  A. S. Byatt

  Dream, Song, Morning

  FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Aug 27, 2011

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• Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.

  Rachel Carson

  Ocean, Men, Sea

  Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sea Around Us”, p.19, Open Road Media

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• Seeing the whales off James Price Point, mothers, babies, bull whales, seeing the count, going up into the thousands of these whales, the assurance that they will be ok with a mega port, mega ships and a huge factory ashore, is now clearly proven wrong.

  Bob Brown

  Mother, Baby, Bulls

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