Midges Quotes

• As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.

  Desiderius Erasmus

  Life, Wise, Laughter

  53 Copy quote

• The midge's wing beats to and fro A thousand times ere one can utter O.

  Coventry Patmore

  Wings, Beats, Thousand

  Coventry Patmore (1906). “Poems: The unknown eros, Amelia, etc”

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• Don't you find it rather heavy, to have everything really in front of you – all the people who are going to matter, whom you haven't met yet, all the choices you are going to have to make, everything you might achieve, and all the possible failures – unreal now? The future flaps round my head like a cloud of midges.

  A. S. Byatt

  Clouds, People, Choices

  4 Copy quote

• If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.

  Lewis Thomas

  School, Sea, Feet

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• I would much rather fight pride than vanity, because pride has a stand-up way of fighting. You know where it is. It throws its black shadow on you, and you are not at a loss where to strike. But vanity is that delusive, that insectiferous, that multiplied feeling, and men that fight vanities are like men that fight midges and butterflies. It is easier to chase them than to hit them.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Butterfly, Fighting, Pride

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal truths”, p.145

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• I am attached to the west coast of Scotland - it's gorgeous to look at and challenging. You have to contend with the possibility of being blown away or rained on. And in the summer months you can be eaten alive by midges.

  Clive Anderson

  Summer, Scotland, Challenges

  7 Copy quote

• I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

  Beryl Markham

  Gun, Men, Elephants

  Beryl Markham (2012). “West with the Night”, p.227, Open Road Media

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• I sing Connecticut, her charms / Of rivers, orchards, blossoming ridges. / I sing her gardens, fences, farms, / Spiders and midges.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Garden, Rivers, Spiders

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• As much as anything, the anglers will clue you in to the midge hatch. You will see them hunched over in concentration like herons. The better ones will be in as close as they can get to the dimpling trout. What you'll notice is the rythmic flicking of casts toward a porpoising trout and the lack of any other motions. The only exception will be the gentle tug that sets a very small hook attached to the leader by a very delicate tippet. The playing of the trout, if it is a good one, will be a cat-and-mouse sort of ecstacy.

  Ed Engle

  Cat, Lakes, Sea

  6 Copy quote

• Yes, I actually have a portable fly-tying kit in my vest. I spent hours putting it all together, with a special emphasis on midge materials as well as enough fur and feathers to whip out a half dozen of virtually every conceivable dry pattern nature can throw at me. I have used it once, in 1993.

  Jack Ohman

  Sea, Fishing, Rivers

  4 Copy quote

• My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Summer, Mother, Memories

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.3, Hamilton Books

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