A Quote by Victor Hugo

A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant-hill of stars.

Victor Hugo

Quote Topics

Ant Bit Flowers Hill Mould Nebula Stars

Quote Author

Victor Hugo
French - Novelist
February 26, 1802 - May 22, 1885

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory. ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate.

Halton Arp

I don't know if this is a stumbling block, but I had a real setback when I won a Nebula Award for the first story I ever had nominated for a Nebula in 1982. And you might think that was a good thing - and it was a wonderful thing, I don't regret it a bit. But I was sort of discombobulated by it.

John Kessel

That is the exploration that awaits you! Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

Leonard Nimoy

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

John Clellon Holmes

O.K. I'm running out of appetite. Let this swirl- a bit like Crab Nebula- do for now.

Charles Olson

Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy.

Orison Swett Marden

We have the right to rid our houses of ants; but what we have no right to do is to forget to honor the ant as God made it, out in the place where God made the ant to be. When we meet the ant on the sidewalk, we step over him. He is a creature, like ourselves; not made in the image of God, it is true, but equal with man as far as creation is concerned. The ant and the man are both creatures.

Francis Schaeffer

An observer situated in a nebula and moving with the nebula will observe the same properties of the universe as any other similarly situated observer at any time.

Hermann Bondi

We take ourselves so seriously moment by moment, but India shows you a sense of eternity. You're one little ant on a hill. You're part of life, but you're not the whole thing.

Felicity Kendal

Giving no pain to any creature, let him slowly accumulate spiritual merit, for the sake ,of acquiring a companion to the next world, just as the white ant ,gradually raises its hill.

Guru Nanak

For Dostoevsky, Fourier is one of the industrious ant-hill engineers, busy, protected by the delusion that his goal, the will-ordered society, is the summation of all his desires.

John Carroll

The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use. But the bee...gathers its materials from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.

Leonardo da Vinci

We begin with friendships, and all our youth is a reconnoitering and recruiting of the holy fraternity they shall combine for thesalvation of men. But so the remoter stars seem a nebula of united light, yet there is no group which a telescope will not resolve; and the dearest friends are separated by impassable gulfs.