Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Variant: "Our primeval Mother Earth is an organism that no science in the world can rationalize. Everything on her that crawls and flies is dependent upon Her and all must hopelessly perish if that Earth dies that feeds us." (Callum Coats: Water Wizard)
XVIII. 130–131 (tr. Robert Fagles). Cf. Iliad, XVII. 446–447.
Samuel Butler's translation:
: Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth.
Robert Fitzgerald's translation:
: Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move,
earth bears none frailer than mankind.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Variant: Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
Source: The Iliad
“The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”
Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey
“For all that Nature by her mother-wit
Could frame in earth.”
Canto 10, stanza 21
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book IV
The Secret of the Machines, Stanza 7.
Other works
Context: But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive,
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth—except The Gods!
“We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.”
I, st. 4
The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/
Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn, st. 14.
“The common growth of Mother Earth
Suffices me,—her tears, her mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.”
Prologue, stanza 27.
Peter Bell (1798)
“Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth.”
Salut au Monde, 11
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Nobel lecture (2001)
Context: Today, in Afghanistan, a girl will be born. Her mother will hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her — just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In these most basic acts of human nature, humanity knows no divisions. But to be born a girl in today's Afghanistan is to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that one small part of humanity has achieved. It is to live under conditions that many of us in this hall would consider inhuman.
I speak of a girl in Afghanistan, but I might equally well have mentioned a baby boy or girl in Sierra Leone. No one today is unaware of this divide between the world’s rich and poor. No one today can claim ignorance of the cost that this divide imposes on the poor and dispossessed who are no less deserving of human dignity, fundamental freedoms, security, food and education than any of us. The cost, however, is not borne by them alone. Ultimately, it is borne by all of us — North and South, rich and poor, men and women of all races and religions.
Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another.
