Insects Quotes

I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.

Source Unknown

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

Emily Dickinson

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

George Bernard Shaw

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

George Eliot

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

Elizabeth Goudge

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.

Bill Vaughan

Some primal termite knocked on wood;and tasted it, and found it good.That is why your Cousin Mayfell through the parlor floor today.

Ogden Nash, The Termite

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

Mark Twain

People who get through life dependent on other people's possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count.

Ben Elton

Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars.

Tama Janowitz

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

Charlotte Bronte

Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my good big centipede! If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.

William S. Burroughs

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.

Primo Levi

The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.

Primo Levi

a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat

Don Marquis