Top 244 Ants Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants, and honey-bees, provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon referred the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence. Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of his history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction. Murder within the species on an individual or collective scale is a phenomenon unknown in the whole animal kingdom, except for man, and a few varieties of ants and rats.

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it.

Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.

Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail.

I don't believe in evil; I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

All living beings, things that move, are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind or rain. To stay healthy and strong, life must have clean air, clear water and pure food. If deprived of these things, life will cycle to the next level, or as the system says, 'die'.

Yeah, Jody [Porter] left. He's a great guitar player. We have a guy named Phil Hurley who is going to go out on tour with us now. I'm not sure if he'll end up as the permanent guitar player, but he's the type of guy who can kind of step in and play anything. He was with the Gigolo Ants before, and he's really good.

We have the ability to approach our race like ants, or we have the ability to approach our race like crabs.

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush? We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants- perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned now? The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone. Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew, and that's why everything you do has some weird sense of failure in it.

Albert and I would spend hours and hours looking at them. Cleo had this big magnifying glass on his desk, and we'd find centipedes and grasshoppers and beetles and potato bugs, ants . . . and put them in a jar and look at them. They have the sweetest little faces and the cutest expressions. After we'd looked at them all we wanted to, we'd put them in the yard and let them go on about their business.

Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that ... But when I got that thinking in my head about if I'm going to be treated in the future as a pet to these smart machines ... well I'm going to treat my own pet dog really nice.

The powerful and prominent soar like dragons, the heroic and valiant fight like tigers: but if you look upon them with cool eyes, they are like ants gathering on rancid meet, like flies swarming on blood. Judgments of right and wrong bristle like porcupine quills: but if you meet them with cool feelings, that is like a forge melting metal, like hot water dissolving snow.

Quinn's First Law of Investing is never to buy anything whose price you can't follow in the newspapers. An investment without a public marketplace attracts the fabulists the way picnics attract ants. Stock brokers and financial planners can tell you anything they want, because no one really knows what's true. The First Corollary to Quinn's First Law states that, even when the price is in the newspapers, you shouldn't buy anything too complex to explain to the average 12-year-old.

Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings.

My very first gig was with the Sex Pistols, and it was also our first-ever gig. It was a very short set, and it was at Saint Martins College of Art in 1975. We were opening up for a band called Bazooka Joe, and their bass player at the time was Adam Ant, who went on to form Adam and the Ants.

Paraphrased: When Chuang Tzu was about to die, his disciples began planning a splendid funeral. However some disciples expressed concern that given a particular arrangement, birds and kites would eat his remains. Chuang Tzu replied, "Well, above ground I shall be eaten by crows and kites, below it by ants and worms. What do you have against birds?

I was playing golf. I swung, missed the ball, and got a big chunk of dirt. I swung again, missed the ball, and got another big chunk of dirt. Just then, 2 ants climbed on the ball saying, "Let's get up here before we get killed!"

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King, where a society of ants declares, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.)

We're all the same. We all want the same thing in life. Everybody going around like ants and we all want the same thing. And it's not one queen. It's not one queen with the wings.

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!

He thought of the jungle, already regrowing around him to cover the scars they had created. He thought of the tiger, killing to eat. Was that evil? And ants? They killed. No, the jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

I know one thing - very few writers in Southern California get to write what they want to write. We are more or less worker ants, working for either film companies or tv companies or Internet companies. We do a lot of assigned work. Feelings hardly ever enter into it. If they do, they tend to be on a sort of soap opera level.

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.

Applied mathematics will always need pure mathematics just as anteaters will always need ants.

It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.

Every time a significant discovery is being made one sets in motion a tremendous activity in laboratories and industrial enterprises throughout the world. It is like the ant who suddenly finds food and walks back to the anthill while sending out material called food attracting substance. The other ants follow the path immediately in order to benefit from the finding and continue to do so as long as the supply is rich.

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.

In that Macondo forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe, secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Úrsula were the only happy beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

You can see the most beautiful things from the observation deck of the Empire State Building. I read somewhere that people on the street are supposed to look like ants, but that's not true. They look like little people. And the cars look like little cars. And even the buildings look little. It's like New York is a miniature replica of New York, which is nice, because you can see what it's really like, instead of how it feels when you're in the middle of it.

Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.

It has become obligatory to fulfil a function which shall in some way be regarded as useful to the masses...Even an articulated mass always tends to become unspiritual and inhuman. It is life without existence, superstition without faith. It may stamp all flat; it is disinclined to tolerate independence and greatness, but prone to constrain people to become as automatic as ants.

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.

Innovations, free thinking is blowing like a storm; those that stand in front of it, ignorant scholars like you, false scientists, perverse conservatives, obstinate goats, resisting mules are being crushed under the weight of these innovations. You are nothing but ants standing in front of the giants; nothing but chicks trying to challenge roaring volcanoes!

If you want to nourish a bird, you should let it live any way it chooses. Creatures differ because they have different likes and dislikes. Therefore the sages never require the same ability from all creatures. . . concepts of right should be founded on what is suitable. The true saint leaves wisdom to the ants, takes a cue from the fishes, and leaves willfulness to the sheep.

God is a God of galaxies, of storms, of roaring seas and boiling thunder, but He is also the God of bread baking, of a child's smile, of dust motes in the sun. He is who He is, and always shall be. Look around you now. He is speaking always and everywhere. His personality can be seen and known and leaned upon. The sun is belching flares while mountains scrape our sky while ants are milking aphids on their colonial leaves and dolphins are laughing in the surf and wheat is rippling and wind is whipping and a boy is looking into the eyes of a girl and mortals are dying.

But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying. Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.

It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

On the lawn next to the sidewalk a fire ant colony is swarming. The ants are pouring out of a mound nest, here no more than an irregular pile of dirt partly flattened by the last pass of a lawnmower. Winged queens and males are taking off on their nuptial flight, protected by angry-looking workers that run up and down the grass blades and out onto the blistering-hot concrete of the sidewalk. The species is unmistakably Solenopsis geminata, the native fire ant.

Some men spend their lives watching bees and ants, noting down the habits of these insects; my pleasure is to watch the human mind, noting how unselfish instincts rise to the surface and sink back again, making way for selfish instincts, each equally necessary, for the world would perish were it to become entirely selfish or entirely unselfish.

Oh, ants, my sisters, good old honeydew-seekers! From close up you are sticky and shiny and gristly; and your nymphs have parasitic red mites stuck to them. You are too intent upon your chewing and gathering to listen to me, but I tell you that despite my warm feelings I really do not like you, and I cannot feel sorry for you in any way because there are too many of you and you are not cute at all. You eat too much of my forests; you are a rebellious tribe, and I will destroy you; I will poison your nests with sweet-smelling traps.

People aren't just ants rushing around over a crust of bread. Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundreds of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or negative. But whichever we decide, it does impact the ones we deal with. One word can give someone the strength they needed at that moment or it can shred them down to nothing. A single smile can turn a bad moment good. And one wrong outburst or word could be the tiny push that causes someone to slip over the edge into destruction.

It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation - a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen to communicate with ants.

I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

It is very very hard for humans to lift our eyes from today and to go out into the future and think about what could be done to bring the future back to the present. Like ants crawling around on the leaf, we political people only know our leaf.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

If all humans disappeared today ,the earth would start improving tomorrow.If all the ants disappeared today ,the earth would start dying tomorrow.

There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.

I went to pick my son up from school and walked him back and was in the house preparing dinner, and he came in the house and gave me this flower of chrysanthemum that was full of ants. And he went back out to play and ran out into the street and got hit by a car. The car happened to be driven by a LAPD detective.

The earth doesn't belong to anyone. It is the land upon which all of us are to live for many years, ploughing, reaping and destroying. You are always a guest on this earth and have the austerity of a guest. Austerity is far deeper than owning only a few things. The very word austerity has been spoilt by the monks, by the sannyasis, by the hermits. Sitting on that high hill alone in the solitude of many things, many rocks and little animals and ants, that word has no meaning.

I don't understand these people anymore, that travel the commuter-trains to their dormitory towns. These people that call themselves human, but, by a pressure they do not feel, are forced to do their work like ants. With what do they fill their time when they are free of work on their silly little Sundays? I am very fortunate in my profession. I feel like a farmer, with the airstrips as my fields. Those that have once tasted this kind of fare will not forget it ever. Not so, my friends?

The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.

I had the great idea of using markers to gently color the ants so I could tell them apart, but I learned that this is exactly like somebody trying to gently color on you with a thirty-story building. Without dwelling on the tragedy, I'd just like to say that I'm deeply sorry to Mr. Purple and the surviving Purple family.

The country's 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. If we amplify everything we hear nothing.

I love the old stuff that's why I included it. I did see them play a lot as they supported the Banshees all the time. And I was a friend of the Banshees so I used to get there early to see the Ants and while the Banshees were on I used to like to go in their dressing room and steal their booze!

Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child's activity. By the time we're grown, we're supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life's miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.

Wherever life is, its main objective is to keep going, and it always wins. And nature? It's all built into nature. Survivability, life perpetuating. And that means there have to be babies. Baby everything! Baby birds, baby human beings, baby ants. You name it. There have to be babies, and what has to happen for there to be babies? Okay, birds and bees. What has to happen for that to happen? It's all intertwined, and it's all nature, and the left has come along and tried to monkey with it by politicizing as much of it as they can for whatever just really convoluted reasons.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

... indeed, what reason may not go to school to the wisdom of bees, ants, and spiders? What wise hand teacheth them to do what reason cannot teach us? Ruder heads stand amazed at those prodigious pieces of nature, whales, elephants, dromedaries, and camels; these, I confess, are the colossuses and majestick pieces of her hand; but in these narrow engines there is more curious mathematieks; and the civility of these little Citizens more neatly sets forth the wisdom of their Maker.