Swarms Quotes - Page 3

• Look at nature with science as a lens. The rock swarms, the clod dances; the mineral is but the vegetable stepping down, and the animal an ascending plant; the man, a beast extended; and the angel, a developed human soul.

  C. A. Bartol

  Nature, Angel, Animal

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• Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. ( Aristotle , and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Kings, Views, Two

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• The Ancient Egyptians considered it good luck to meet a swarm of Bees on the road. What they considered bad luck I couldn't say.

  Will Cuppy

  Good Luck, Bees, Ancient

  "How to Attract the Wombat". Book by Will Cuppy, 1949.

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• One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.

  George Sand

  Thinking, May, Honey

  George Sand (1800). “The Haunted Pool: (La Mare Au Diable).”, p.38

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• Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? ... If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Kings, Forever, Honor

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• New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others

  John D. MacDonald

  New York, Thinking, Two

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• Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Jobs, Inspiration, Artist

  "The Poet and the World". Nobel Lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 07, 1996.

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• You want to stay alive in a zombie swarm? You go alone or in a small group, where everyone is of similar physical condition and weapons training. You never stop, you never hesitate, and you never show any mercy for the people that would slow you down.That is what the military says we should do, and if I ever meet anybody who listens to that particular set of commands, I may shoot them myself just to improve the gene pool. When you can help people stay alive, you help them. We're all we've got.

  Mira Grant

  Military, People, Training

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• I go and I keep friends with [Abe] Rosenthal at the New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all - I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.

  Billy Graham

  Country, New York, Mean

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• We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Order, Gnats, Darkness

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• Mr. President at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death.

  Robert Toombs

  Suicide, War, Ocean

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• To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, every inch of space is a miracle, every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same; every spear of grass-the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them, all these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.

  Walt Whitman

  Dark, Men, Squares

  Walt Whitman (2004). “Whitman: The Mystic Poets”, p.96, SkyLight Paths Publishing

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• 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.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Important, Legends, Fierce

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, there a church of God exists, even if it swarms with many faults.

  John Calvin

  Church, Faults, Heard

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• On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover.

  Alexander Carmichael

  Summer, Song, Winter

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• The Irishman frees himself from slavery when he realizes the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland. The Irish question is a social question. The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people, or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them - the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation?

  James Connolly

  Mean, Fighting, Son

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• It is reported from the famous worshiper Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya (radiAllahu anha) that she said: "I have never heard the adhaan except that I remember the caller who will announce the Day of Resurrection, and I never see the falling snow except that I imagine the flying pages of the records of peoples deeds (on that day), and I never see swarms of locusts except that I think about the Great Gathering on the Last Day."

  Rabia Basri

  Wisdom, Fall, Islamic

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• Summer is a prodigal of joy. The grass Swarms with delighted insects as I pass, And crowds of grasshoppers at every stride Jump out all ways with happiness their guide; And from my brushing feet moths flit away In safer places to pursue their play. In crowds they start. I marvel, well I may, To see such worlds of insects in the way, And more to see each thing, however small, Sharing joy's bounty that belongs to all. And here I gather, by the world forgot, Harvests of comfort from their happy mood, Feeling God's blessing dwells in every spot And nothing lives but owes him gratitude.

  John Clare

  Summer, Gratitude, Blessing

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• We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

  Anthony Doerr

  Mother, Heart, Cells

  Anthony Doerr (2014). “All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel”, p.468, Simon and Schuster

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• Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.

  Romain Gary

  Dark, Clouds, Epidemics

  Introduction to "The Plague" by Albert Camus, 1962 edition,

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• Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail.

  Peter Wessel Zapffe

  Men, Breathing, Earth

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• Many a night I saw the Pleiads,
  Rising thro' the mellow shade,
  Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies,
  Tangled in a silver braid.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Stars, Science, Night

  Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Baron, Alfred Lord Tennyson (2014). “Fifty Poems”, p.112, Cambridge University Press

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• Fairies, arouse! Mix with your song Harplet and pipe, Thrilling and clear, Swarm on the boughs! Chant in a throng! Morning is ripe, Waiting to hear.

  William Allingham

  Song, Morning, Waiting

  William Allingham (1877). “Songs, Ballads, and Stories: Including Many Now First Collected, the Rest Revised and Rearranged”

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• It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Men, Sea, Land

  Jerome K. Jerome “Annotated Three Men in a Boat with English Grammar Exercises: by Jerome K. Jerome (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them.

  Henry Adams

  Wings, Use, Politics

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