Swarms Quotes

• The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants.

  Isoroku Yamamoto

  Overcoming, May, Ants

  Statement in opposition of the planned construction of the Yamato class battleships. "Scraps of Paper: The Disarmament Treaties Between the World Wars". Book by Harlow A. Hyde, 1988.

  69 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Freedom, Bees And Honey, Honey Bee

  Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) (1928). “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life swarms with innocent monsters.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Monsters, Innocent, Strange Phenomena

  Charles Baudelaire (2001). “The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo”, p.101

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• From restless thoughts, that, like a deadly swarm Of hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone, But rush upon me thronging.

  John Milton

  Thinking, Anxiety, Arms

  John Milton, Elijah Fenton (1831). “Paradise Lost : a Poem in Twelve Books”, p.96

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• The multiplying villainies of nature do swarm upon him... [from Macbeth]

  Alan Moore

  Vendetta, Multiplying, Villainy

  21 Copy quote

• Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.

  Robert Frost

  Clouds, Waiting, Storm

  8 Copy quote

• Generally speaking, there is more wit than talent in the world. Society swarms with witty people who lack talent.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Witty, Talking, People

  22 Copy quote

• When I consider how little of a rarity children are -- that every street and blind alley swarms with them -- that the poorest people commonly have them in most abundance -- that there are few marriages that are not blest with at least one of these bargains -- how often they turn out ill, and defeat the fond hopes of their parents, taking to vicious courses, which end in poverty, disgrace, the gallows, etc. -- I cannot for my life tell what cause for pride there can possibly be in having them.

  Charles Lamb

  Children, Pride, People

  Charles Lamb (1869). “The Essays of Elia and Eliana”, p.133

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• No one can count the terrors that the earth spawns, catastrophic, gruesome, and the vast arms of the sea swarm with brute monsters bent on harm, and everywhere between the sky and ground lights bloom by day in flares and sudden bolts; and birds and beasts alike can tell of the whirlwind's whirling wrath.

  Aeschylus

  Wrath, Light, Sea

  Aeschylus, Alan Shapiro, Peter Burian (2003). “The Oresteia”, p.128, Oxford University Press, USA

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey.

  Orson Scott Card

  Successful, Secret, Honey

  7 Copy quote

• Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

  Katherine Dunn

  Heart, Bees, Like You

  5 Copy quote

• A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.

  Lewis Thomas

  Next, Location, Sun

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I go hear a man speak, I like to hear him speak like he's fighting a swarm of bees.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Fighting, Men, Bees

  6 Copy quote

• Each time a swarm of worries invades your mind, refuse to be affected; wait calmly, while seeking the remedy. Spray the worries with the powerful chemical of your peace.

  Paramahansa Yogananda

  Powerful, Worry, Waiting

  38 Copy quote

• One of the amusements of idleness is reading without fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Reading, Wish

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.385

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
  And give us not to think so far away
  As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
  All simply in the springing of the year.
  
  Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
  Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
  And make us happy in the happy bees,
  The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

  Robert Frost

  Spring, Flower, Thinking

  Robert Frost (2013). “Delphi Works of Robert Frost (Illustrated)”, p.10, Delphi Classics

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Straight up from this road
  Away from the fitted particles of frost
  Coating the hull of each chick pea,
  And the stiff archer bug making its way
  In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair,
  Up the stem of the trillim,
  Straight up through the sky above this road right now,
  The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster
  Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm
  Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes.
  I try to remember that.

  Pattiann Rogers

  Morning, Archer, Dark

  Pattiann Rogers (2014). “The Expectations of Light”, p.35, Princeton University Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Song, Maenads, Noise

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2014). “The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition”, p.133, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.

  Ken Robinson

  Being Yourself, Elements, Compulsion

  4 Copy quote

• There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

  Milan Kundera

  Lying, Sadness, Elude Us

  12 Copy quote

• Zombies have no memories of their former life. You wont see the undead trying to wash windows or do your taxes. All they know how to do is swarm and feed.

  Max Brooks

  Memories, Zombie, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Men, Garden

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.393, Book House

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• I am closest of all to happiness—although I won’t attempt to define just what it is—when I turn away from the window and am aware, with the edge of my consciousness, that a moment ago I was not here, there was simply the world outside the window, and something beautiful and incomprehensible, something which there is absolutely no need to ‘comprehend,’ existed for a few seconds instead of the usual swarm of thoughts, of which one, like a locomotive, pulls all the others after it, absorbs them all and calls itself ‘I’.

  Victor Pelevin

  Beautiful, World, Usual

  23 Copy quote

• My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
  Holds up each summer day and shakes
  It out suspiciously, lest swarms
  Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.

  Philip Larkin

  Summer, Mother, Hate

  Philip Larkin, “Mother, Summer, I”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm not fond of cities: the constant activity and swarms of people.

  Joanne Harris

  Cities, People, Constant

  7 Copy quote