Quotes about ant

A collection of quotes on the topic of ant, likeness, doing, evening.

Quotes about ant

“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.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

Life, People, Books, Way

“For the faults of the many, judge not the whole. Everything on earth is of mixed character, like a mingling of sand and sugar. Be like the wise ant which seizes only the sugar, and leaves the sand untouched.”

Mahavatar Babaji Hindu Yogi

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Ch. 36 : Babaji's Interest in the West

“Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.”

Terry Pratchett book Reaper Man

Source: Reaper Man

Study, Time

“We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood.”

U.G. Krishnamurti (1918–2007) Indian philosopher

Source: No Way Out (2002), Ch. 4: You Invent Your Reality

“Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)
Context: If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

Faith

“We could mate. In a year our nestlings would be large enough to mob anyone we like… Should I begin to court you? Do you like grubs or ants better?… I will be here. In case you change your mind about mating.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

Source: Trickster's Choice

Change

“If I have to worry about the ants I crush beneath my feet, I couldn't even walk around”

Kentaro Miura (1966) Japanese manga artist

Source: Berserk, Vol. 1

“It was as if his point of view had, within seconds, gone from that of an ant to that of an eagle.
For the sky was hollow, and the world was round.”

Christopher Paolini book Inheritance

Source: Inheritance

World

“In my servant the ant, my tiny servant, who hoards greedily like a miser.
Who works like one unhappy and who has no break and who has no rest.”

Charles Péguy (1873–1914) French poet, essayist, and editor

The Portal of the Mystery of Hope (1912)

“Are there still forests over there? They are, apparently, wild and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, full of ant-hills, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent and kindly, without yesterdays or tomorrows. From one island to another, above the volcanoes, they play cards with inmatched packs. Naked, they are decked only in their majesty and their mystery.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

1910 - 1935, The mysteries of the forest' (1934)

“In between these four whitewashed walls, on this tiled floor, notice the broken corners, how some tiles have been worn smooth, how many feet have passed this way, and look how interesting this trail of ants is, travelling along the joins as if they were valleys, while up above, projected against the white sky of the ceiling and the sun of the lamp, tall towers are moving, they are men, as the ants well know, having, for generations, experienced the weight of their feet and the long, hot spout of water that falls from a kind of pendulous external intestine, ants all over the world have been drowned or crushed by these, but it seems they will escape this fate now, for the men are occupied with other things. […]
Let's take this ant, or, rather, let's not, because that would involve picking it up, let us merely consider it, because it is one of the larger ones and because it raises its head like a dog, it's walking along very close to the wall, together with its fellow ants it will have time to complete its long journey ten times over between the ants' nest and whatever it is that it finds so interesting, curious or perhaps merely nourishing in this secret room […]. One of the men has fallen to the ground, he's on the same level as the ants now, we don't know if he can see them, but they see him, and he will fall so often that, in the end, they will know by heart his face, the color of his hair and eyes, the shape of his ear, the dark arc of his eyebrow, the faint shadow at the corner of his mouth, and later, back in the ants' nest, they will weave long stories for the enlightenment of future generations, because it is useful for the young to know what happens out there in the world. The man fell and the others dragged him to his feet again, shouting at him, asking two different questions at the same time, how could he possibly answer them even if he wanted to, which is not the case, because the man who fell and was dragged to his feet will die without saying a word. Only moans will issue from his mouth, and in the silence of his soul only deep sighs, and even when his teeth are broken and he has to spit them out, which will prompt the other two men to hit him again for soiling state property, even then the sound will be of spitting and nothing more, that unconscious reflex of the lips, and then the dribble of saliva thickened with blood that falls to the floor, thus stimulating the taste buds of the ants, who telegraph from one to the other news of this singularly red manna fallen from such a white heaven.
The man fell again. It's the same one, said the ants, the same ear shape, the same arc of eyebrow, the same shadow at the corner of the mouth, there's no mistaking him, why is it that it is always the same man who falls, why doesn't he defend himself, fight back. […] The ants are surprised, but only fleetingly. After all, they have their own duties, their own timetables to keep, it is quite enough that they raise their heads like dogs and fix their feeble vision on the fallen man to check that he is the same one and not some new variant in the story. The larger ant walked along the remaining stretch of wall, slipped under the door, and some time will pass before it reappears to find everything changed, well, that's just a manner of speaking, there are still three men there, but the two who do not fall never stop moving, it must be some kind of game, there's no other explanation […]. [T]hey grab him by the shoulders and propel him willy-nilly in the direction of the wall, so that sometimes he hits his back, sometimes his head, or else his poor bruised face smashes into the whitewash and leaves on it a trace of blood, not a lot, just whatever spurts forth from his mouth and right eyebrow. And if they leave him there, he, not his blood, slides down the wall and he ends up kneeling on the ground, beside the little trail of ants, who are startled by the sudden fall from on high of that great mass, which doesn't, in the end, even graze them. And when he stays there for some time, one ant attaches itself to his clothing, wanting to take a closer look, the fool, it will be the first ant to die, because the next blow falls on precisely that spot, the ant doesn't feel the second blow, but the man does.”

José Saramago book Raised from the Ground

Source: Raised from the Ground (1980), pp. 172–174

Men, Fate, Secret, World

“The ant is no lender; that is the least of her faults.”

Jean De La Fontaine (1621–1695) French poet, fabulist and writer.

La fourmi n'est pas prêteuse;
C'est là son moindre défaut.
Book I (1668), fable 1.
Fables (1668–1679)

“When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction. They ran about like ants in the streets of their city — poor gods, poor gods!”

Stephen Vincent Benét book By the Waters of Babylon

Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)

God, War, Time

“Ants never head for an empty granary:
no friends gather round when your wealth is gone.”
Horrea formicae tendunt ad inania numquam: nullus ad amissas ibit amicus opes.

Ovid book Tristia

I, ix, 9-10; translation by A.S. Kline
Tristia (Sorrows)

Wealth

“Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams,
Where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant! "Les Sept Vieillards" [The Seven Old Men] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_sept_vieillards Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Dreams

“I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.”

Miriam Makeba (1932–2008) South African singer and civil rights activist

As quoted in Nkrumah, Gamal (1–7 November 2001)
Al-Ahram Weekly interview (2001)

“When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections, faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power, anywhere — on sea, or land, or high in the air — humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick: See the excitement coming!”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

"The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires" in Electrical World and Engineer (5 March 1904)

Truth, Secret, Imagination, Motivation

“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
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

archy and mehitabel (1927), what the ants are saying

“Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces.”

Michael Faraday (1791–1867) English scientist

Lecture notes of 1858, quoted in The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870) by Bence Jones, Vol. 2, p. 404
Context: Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces. All this is true of the teaching afforded by any part of physical science. Electricity is often called wonderful, beautiful; but it is so only in common with the other forces of nature. The beauty of electricity or of any other force is not that the power is mysterious, and unexpected, touching every sense at unawares in turn, but that it is under law, and that the taught intellect can even now govern it largely. The human mind is placed above, and not beneath it, and it is in such a point of view that the mental education afforded by science is rendered super-eminent in dignity, in practical application and utility; for by enabling the mind to apply the natural power through law, it conveys the gifts of God to man.

Bee

“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

“What are you guys doing? If you anted me to take a shower, all you had to do was pay me ten bucks, like you usually do”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Angel

Guy

“I’ll affect you slowly
as if you were having a picnic in a dream.
There will be no ants.
It won’t rain.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: Loading Mercury With a Pitchfork

Dreams

“Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself … Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate.”

Ralph Ellison book Invisible Man

Source: Invisible Man

Game, Boy, Learning

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”

Henry David Thoreau Letters to Various Persons

Letter to Harrison Blake (16 November 1857)
Source: Letters to Various Persons

“If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Source: Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

Faith

“The first of the
line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tree

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

Toni Morrison book The Bluest Eye

Source: The Bluest Eye

Death, World, Spring, Grass

“Defeating one ant had taken all my energy. (I don’t think I have ever written a sadder sentence than that.)”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

Thinking

“I wonder what ants do on rainy days?”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

“Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent

Failure, Hell

“The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house.
The child and the afternoon do not know you
because you have died forever.

The shoulder of the stone does not know you
nor the black silk on which you are crumbling.
Your silent memory does not know you
because you have died forever.

The autumn will come with conches,
misty grapes and clustered hills,
but no one will look into your eyes
because you have died forever.

Because you have died for ever,
like all the dead of the earth,
like all the dead who are forgotten
in a heap of lifeless dogs.

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you.
For posterity I sing of your profile and grace.
Of the signal maturity of your understanding.
Of your appetite for death and the taste of its mouth.
Of the sadness of your once valiant gaiety.”

Federico García Lorca Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

No te conoce el toro ni la higuera,
ni caballos ni hormigas de tu casa.
No te conoce el niño ni la tarde
porque te has muerto para siempre.No te conoce el lomo de la piedra,
ni el raso negro donde te destrozas.
No te conoce tu recuerdo mudo
porque te has muerto para siempre.El otoño vendrá con caracolas,
uva de niebla y montes agrupados,
pero nadie querrá mirar tus ojos
porque te has muerto para siempre.Porque te has muerto para siempre,
como todos los muertos de la Tierra,
como todos los muertos que se olvidan
en un montón de perros apagados.No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto.
Yo canto para luego tu perfil y tu gracia.
La madurez insigne de tu conocimiento.
Tu apetencia de muerte y el gusto de su boca.
La tristeza que tuvo tu valiente alegría.
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Dogs, Death, Sadness, Understanding

“I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards... I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"The Aleph" ["El Aleph"] (1945)

World, Housing

“Does it matter in the least to God whether you believe or not? Even the sage Suka Deva was to Him like a big ant at the most. Infinite is He. How much can you understand of Him?”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 327]

God, Understanding

“And what's more wonderful, when big loads foil
One ant or two to carry, quickly then
A swarm flock round to help their fellow-men.”

John Clare (1793–1864) English poet

"The Ants"
Poems Chiefly from Manuscript

Men, Help

“We investigate how the degree to which credit markets are centralized affects efficiency when there is asymmetric information. Specifically, we argue that decentralization of credit may promote efficient project selection when creditors are not fully informed ex ante about project quality.
Our starting point is the idea that, although an entrepreneur (project manager) may have a relatively good idea of her project's quality from the outset, creditors acquire this information only later on, by which time the criteria for profitability may have changed. Thus, a poor project (one whose completion time is too long to be profitable ex ante) may nevertheless be financed, since a creditor cannot distinguish it at the time from a good (quick) project.”

Eric Maskin (1950) American Nobel laureate in economics

Mathias Dewatripont and Eric Maskin. " Credit and efficiency in centralized and decentralized economies http://www.sef.hku.hk/~cgxu/0601/ECON0601/Dewatripont-Maskin_SBC_RES95.pdf." The Review of Economic Studies 62.4 (1995): 541-555.

Idea, Change, Time

“If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on forever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Mind and Matter (1958)

Men, War, World, Fear

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War, People, Mountain, Star

“Myrmecophaga jubata: The anteater. The existence of this predator demonstrates that thinking 71 percent of the time, as ants do, won't prevent you from being eaten. Thinking less than that, as humans do, will almost guarantee it.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Myrmecophaga jubata"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Thinking, Time

“As a young man, Valmiki searched through the world seeking open friendship and happiness and hope and finding none of these he went alone into the empty forest where no man lived, to as spot where the Tamasa River flows into Ganga. There he sat for years without moving, so still that white ants built an anthill over him. There Valmiki sat inside that anthill for thousands of years with only his eyes showing out, trying to find the True, his hands folded and his mind lost in contemplation.”

Vālmīki Ramayana

In p. 5.
Ramayana

Friendship, World, Hope, Search

“Myrdalian ex ante language would have saved the General Theory from describing the flow of investment and the flow of saving as identically, tautologically equal, and within the same discourse, treating their equality as a condition which may, or not, be fulfilled”

G. L. S. Shackle (1903–1992) British economist

G. L. S. Shackle (1989) "What did the General Theory do?", in J. Pheby (ed), New Directions in Post-keynesian Economics, Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China. 1850s

War, People, World, Education

“whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.”

Francis Pharcellus Church Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (1897)

Men, Children, Truth, World

“Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

The Summer Rain, st. 3

Lie

“A million million worlds that move in peace;
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves and store of millet-seeds.
They sleep beneath the sod
And trust in God.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

A Common Inference.
In this Our World : Poems (1898)

God, World, Peace, Law

““When he advanced from the capital of Karra, the Hindus, in alarm, descended into the earth like ants. He departed towards the garden of Behar to dye that soil with blood as red as tulip. He cleared the road to Ujjain of vile wretches, and created consternation in Bhilsan. When he effected his conquests in that country, he drew out of the river the idols which had been concealed in it.”66”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

About Sultan ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji (AD 1296-1316) in Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own historians, Vol. III, p. 542.ff
Miftahu'l-Futuh

Country

“I am aware that this last statement may be disputed and individual testimony perhaps adduced to show that in ante-bellum days the ballot was as untrammelled in the south as in any section of the country; but in the face of any such contradiction I reassert the statement. The shot-gun was not resorted to. Masked men did not ride over the country at night intimidating voters; but there was a firm feeling that a class existed in every State with a sort of divine right to control public affairs. If they could not get this control by one means they must by another. The end justified the means. The coercion, if mild, was complete.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

Source: 1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 16.

Men, Feeling, Night, Country

“Great god of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel.”

Karel Čapek Pictures from the Insects' Life

Pictures from the Insects' Life (1922), as translated in 'And so ad infinitum (The Life of the Insects) : An Entomological Review in Three Acts, a Prologue and an Epilogue (1936) co-written with his brother Josef Čapek, p. 60; also known as The Insect Play

God, Victory

“It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth?”

Evelyn Waugh book Decline and Fall

Part One, Chapter XII
Decline and Fall (1928)

Life, Home, Birth, Parting

“As I write, a bee flies into my window and an ant crawls along the balcony. The ant and the bee are enjoying their present temporary life even as I am enjoying my temporary existence. When I become an "ancient one," so too will the ant and the bee become an "ancient bee" and an "ancient ant." What mystery and what joy that I should be living today at this hour by this place before this window with pen, inkstone, and paper spread before me, while my mind thinks and my hand writes in the company of the present bee and the present ant!”

Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) Chinese writer

"What Can I Do About It?"

Life, Thinking, Bee, Joy

“Religion was nearly dead because there was no longer real belief in future life; but something was struggling to take its place — service — social service — the ants' creed, the bees' creed.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Source: Over the River (1933), Ch. 11

Life, Religion, Bee, Future

“Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant?
Anyone knows an ant, can’t
Move a rubber tree plant.
But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes
He’s got high apple pie, in the sky hopes.”

Sammy Cahn (1913–1993) American lyricist, songwriter, musician

High Hopes (1959)
Song lyrics

Hope, Thinking, Tree

“Whence we see spiders, flies, or ants entombed and preserved forever in amber, a more than royal tomb.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Historia Vitæ et Mortis; Sylva Sylvarum, Cent. i. Exper. 100, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet

"Letter of 1607", as cited by Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., 2012, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, p. 218.

God, Books, Grass, Learning

“Science Fiction Gods; Do they take much of an interest in us? I doubt it. How much entertainment does an ant's nest provide you with?
'Adepticus Sir, that bunch of Ornithoids on Artoc 4 that you asked me to observe, well they've just trashed their planet.'
'Oh that is a pity Initiatus Jones. What was it this time, ecological screw up or nuclear winter?'
'Worse than that sir, i looks lke they were mucking around with vacuum energy without having first invented the Mobius sphere.'
'Ah yes, the old classic mistake, we loose a few like that.'
'Could we not have tipped them off about it Sir?'
'I'm afraid not Jones, stupidity must remain its own reward, it's regrettable but there you are. Did you salvage anything?'
'They composed some fairly good poetry a couple of centuries ago, and some rather fine cloud sculptures fairly recently, I've logged some records in the archives.'
'Splendid Jones, I'll peruse them this evening. What about those Apes on Sol 3, how are they getting on?'
'Quit a bit of warfare as usual Sir, mostly based on chemical explosives these days, but with the occasional use of plutonium. Many of them have developed a belief in a big bang theory, and they reckon that they have the maths to prove it.'
'Really? Smith in anthropology will probably find that hilarious, I'm sure she would appreciate the data. It was one of her old Stomping grounds you know?'
'No I didnt know that Sir'
'It was a long time ago Jones, and a bit of a fiasco actually, she gave them a piece of her mind about some of their barbaric behavior which then abruptly became worse. Ever since then they have been obsessed with the number plate on her craft, it read 'JHVH'. The department gave her a desk job after that.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: The Apophenion (2008), p. 107-108

God, Stupidity, Behavior, Science

“The Americans didn't even think about the outcome of the bombing, because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about. Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought, step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt, and that's morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Michael Powell in the Washington Post, May 5, 2002 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2002/05/05/an-eminence-with-no-shades-of-gray/7fbaf1b5-ce87-45e3-a84f-604c61bb378e/?utm_term=.e1d833548377 Quotes 2000s, 2002

Thinking

“Even if astrology had been a real science, I knew nothing about it. We find countless events in real history which would never have occurred if they had not been predicted. This is because we are the authors of our so-called destiny, and all the 'antecedent necessities' of the Stoics are chimerical; the argument which proves the power of destiny seems strong only because it is sophistical. Cicero laughed at it. Someone whom he had invited to dinner, who had promised to go, and who had not appeared, wrote to him that since he had not gone it was evident that he had not been iturus ('going to go'). Cicero answers him: Veni ergo cras, et veni etiamsi venturus non sis ('Then come tomorrow, and come even if you are not going to come'). At this date, when I am conscious that I rely entirely on my common sense, I owe this explanation to my reader, despite the axiom, Fata viam inveniunt ('Destiny finds the way'). If the fatalists are obliged by their own philosophy to consider the concatenation of all events necessary, a parte ante ('a priori'), what remains of man's moral freedom is nothing; and in that case he can neither earn merit nor incur guilt. I cannot in conscience admit that I am a machine.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

History of My Life (trans. Trask 1967), 1997 reprint, v. 7, chapter 8, p. 172
Referenced

Way, History, Sense, Freedom

“In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops.”

Mark Slouka (1958) author

Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness

People, Business

“When he advanced from the capital of Karra, the Hindus, in alarm, descended into the earth like ants. He departed towards the garden of Behar to dye that soil with blood as red as tulip. He cleared the road to Ujjain of vile wretches, and created consternation in Bhilsan. When he effected his conquests in that country, he drew out of the river the idols which had been concealed in it.”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Vol. III, p. 543.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Country

“Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly, and intemperate father, and abandoned by respondents who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on, and yet did essentially nothing except, as the Court revealingly observes, ante, at 193, "dutifully recorded these incidents in [their] files." It is a sad commentary upon American life, and constitutional principles - so full of late of patriotic fervor and proud proclamations about "liberty and justice for all" - that this child, Joshua DeShaney, now is assigned to live out the remainder of his life profoundly retarded. Joshua and his mother, as petitioners here, deserve - but now are denied by this Court - the opportunity to have the facts of their case considered in the light of the constitutional protection that 42 U. S. C. 1983 is meant to provide."”

Harry Blackmun (1908–1999) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989)

Life, Sadness, Justice, Light

“Fools! who fancy Christ mistaken;
Man a tool to buy and sell;
Earth a failure, God-forsaken,
Ante-room of Hell.”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

The World's Age, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Attributed

God, Fools, Failure, Hell

“.. whatever may have been the style and title, the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp, insipidity, and emptiness. Caesar appeared in public not in the robe of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes, but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity as the proper regal attire, and received, sitting on his golden chair and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate. The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories, and of vows, filled the calendar. When Caesar came to the capital, his principal servants marched forth in trips to great distances so as to meet and escort him. To be near to him began to be of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city where he lived. Personal interviews with him were rendered so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience, that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the ante-chamber. People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself, that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen. There arose a monarchical aristocracy, which was a remarkable manner at once new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of the royalty, the nobility of the patriciate. The patrician body still subsisted, although without essential privileges as an order, in the character of a close aristocratic guild; but as it could receive no new gentes it had dwindled away more and more in the course of centuries, and in Caesar's time there were not more than fifteen or sixteen patrician gentes still in existence. Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right of creating new patrician gentes conferred on the Imperator by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate, which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchichal aristocracy - the charm of antiquity, entire dependence on the government, and total insignificance. On all sides the new sovereignty revealed itself.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 4, Part 2. Translated by W.P. Dickson.
The New Court.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

People, Communication, Idea, Birthday

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life, Hostility, Children, Lie

“Business System Planning (BSP) and Business Information Control Study (BICS) are representative of enterprise analysis tools that are growing in importance and are likely to become mandatory for ant business that continues to grow and evolve.”

John Zachman (1934) American computer scientist

Source: Business Systems Planning and Business Information Control Study: A comparison, 1982, p. 31

Business, Study

“The Psychology of Delay. Some of the causes of delay in coming to economic decisions in our country seem to lie in the psychological realm. There is such a thing as the psychology of power which motivates people: power of control and patronage, power to delay an application, power to hold up a file, power to keep people waiting in an ante-room, all of which are consciously or subconsciously treated as symbols of prestige and hallmarks of importance.”

J. R. D. Tata (1904–1993) Indian businessman

To The Central Advisory Council of Industries, New Delhi, January 3, 1969.
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders

People, Lie, Motivation, Decision

“National elections. Nothing is so fundamental to the integrity of a republican form of government as honesty in all that relates to the conduct of elections. I am of the opinion that the national laws governing the choice of members of the Congress should be extended to include appropriate representation of the respective parties at the ballot box ant equality of representation on the various registration boards, wherever they exist.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Law, Box

“men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

archy and mehitabel (1927), what the ants are saying

Men, Money, World, Learning

“I can’t really imagine war. I can imagine having to fight some swarm of zombie machines or snarling horde of posthuman fast-burn wreckage or whatever, but not two or more actual human societies actually fighting each other. I’m aware that people did that, before history, before the Moon, but it seems irrational. One side would have to believe they had something to gain from destroying or damaging the other, which just doesn’t make sense: it runs up against the law of association. And more to the point, each individual on any side would have to believe that they benefited from participating even if they died, which doesn’t make sense either. I suppose kin selection could make genes prevalent that made people vulnerable to that kind of illusion, but that only makes sense with animals that don’t have foresight. Even crows aren’t that stupid, at least not the ones that can talk. You have to get down to ants and such like before you see that kind of genetic mechanical mindlessness.”

Ken MacLeod book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 9 “Red Sun Circle” (pp. 134-135)

War, People, Stupidity, Law

“He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No — panther claws should rip open his throat — that would be much too good for him! Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

On Werner Herzog, p. 220-21
Kinski Uncut : The Autobiography of Klaus Kinski (1996)

Death, Lying

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women, Men, People, Books

“[Footnote:] An Ant on a hot stove-lid runs faster than an Ant on a cold one. Who wouldn't?”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Ant, from Insects for Everybody
How to Attract the Wombat (1949)

“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.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

As quoted in Voices: A Memoir (1983) by Frederic Prokosch

Nature, Evil

“Everything in the varying human affairs is due to chance, according to Aristotle, to the Divine Will alone according to the Ashariyah, to Divine Wisdom according to the Mu'tazilites, to the merits of man according to our opinion. It is therefore possible, according to the Ashariyah, that God inflicts pain on a good and pious man in this world, and eeps him forever in fire, which is assumed to rage in the world to come; they simply say it is the will of God. The Mu'tazilites would consider this an injustice, and therefore assume that every being, even an ant, that is stricken with pain, has compensation for it… and it is due to God's Wisdom, that a being is struck and afflicted in order to receive compensation. We, however, believe that all these human affairs are managed with justice; far be it from God to do wrong, to punish any one unless the punishment is necessary and merited. It is distinctly stated in the Law, that all is done in accordance with justice; and the words of our Sages generally express the same idea.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

Wisdom, God, Pain, World

“When gnats act in concert they will bring
down an elephant: when ants set to work,
and move in a body, they can strip a fierce
lion of its hide”

Saadi book Gulistan of Sa'di

Chapter 3, story 28 http://books.google.com/books?id=LDpbAAAAQAAJ&q=%22use+a+sweet+tongue+courtesy+and+gentleness+and+thou+mayst+manage+to+guide+an+elephant+with+a+hair%22&pg=PA292#v=onepage Gulistan (1258)

“Rightly did Darwin pin up a paper warning himself to be careful about using such words as "higher" and "lower." What is downward about the trend that has produced elephants, chimpanzees, wolves, dolphins, and jackdaws by comparison with ants and bees?”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

Bee

“You are very lovely now and soon you will be beautiful. Ant not in an ordinary way. Youth is always beautiful, but you are like some creatures of fairy born to bring ill to mortals. Only trouble can follow such gifts”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Love, Youth, Beauty, Way

“She said, "Spell 'ant' ", and I wrote out the entire alphabet. She said, "That doesn't spell 'ant' ", and I said, "It's in there somewhere! There's the A, there's the N, there's the T – the rest are silent!"”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Live at the Ambassadors (1993)

“The public could not do any more than take firearms and assisting the police as they have done, but by the light that shines pegged on an ant-bed with their bellies opened their fat taken out rendered and poured down their throat boiling hot will be fool to what pleasure I will give some of them and any person aiding or harbouring or assisting the Police …”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)

Pleasure, Fools, Light, Personality

“We do not demand for our own people any more than the basic human rights which we would extend to every nation, people and tribe on this planet: the right to preserve their own territory, traditions and ethnic identity. The right to preserve, in other words, the things which, by marking their differences from the mass of humanity, make them human and turn their society from an ant heap into a community.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, The BNP: Anti-asylum protest, racist sect or power-winning movement? http://web.archive.org/web/20030605150634/http://www.bnp.org.uk/articles/race_reality.htm

People, Communication

“The fundamental idea of transaction costs is that they consist of the cost of arranging a contract ex ante and monitoring and enforcing it ex post, as opposed to production costs, which are the costs of executing a contract.”

R. C. O. Matthews (1927–2010) British economist

Source: "The Economics of Institutions and the Sources of Growth." 1986, p. 904; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 14)

Idea

“Even Kings and emperors with heaps of wealth and vast dominion cannot compare with an ant filled with the love of God.”

Nanak (1469–1539) Founder of Sikhism

Guru Nanak quotes

Love, God, Wealth

“If we were created in God's image, then when God was a child he smushed fire ants with his fingertips and avoided tough questions.”

Buddy Wakefield (1974) American poet

"Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars"
Poetry

God, Question

“The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children. Even insects play together, as has been described by that excellent observer, P. Huber, who saw ants chasing and pretending to bite each other, like so many puppies.
The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. Terror acts in the same manner on them as on us, causing the muscles to tremble, the heart to palpitate, the sphincters to be relaxed, and the hair to stand on end. Suspicion, the offspring of fear, is eminently characteristic of most wild animals. Courage and timidity are extremely variable qualities in the individuals of the same species, as is plainly seen in our dogs. Some dogs and horses are ill-tempered and easily turn sulky; others are good-tempered; and these qualities are certainly inherited.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter II: "Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Animals", pages 39-40 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=52&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Pain, Children, Pleasure, Fear

“It was not until the ant and Veig had passed each other that Niall realized that he had been reading the ant's mind. It was a sensation like actually being the ant, as if he had momentarily taken possession of its body. And while he had been inside the ant's body, he had also become aware of all the other ants in the nest. It was a bewildering feeling, as if his mind had shattered into thousands of fragments, yet each fragment remained a coherent part of the whole.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), p. 57

Feeling, Reading, Parting

“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223

Fate, Sense

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

VIII. Information, Language, and Society. p. 157.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Intelligence, Communication, Learning, Memory

“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting, Sea

“There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation when saving is increasing without a corresponding increase of investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to a disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46

“I recalled the ants I had watched as a child on the farm, building their hills one grain of sand at a time, only to have them senselessly destroyed in an instant by a passing foot. I'd pieced my life together the same way, slowly and agonizingly. Would it, too, be kicked callously into dust?”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 214
2000s, (2008)

Life, Way, Time

“The portion of the materia prima which is… is endowed with the intellectual faculty, possesses a special property by which each individual, according to the degree of his perfection, is enabled to manage, to calculate, and to discover what is conducive both to the temporary existence of the individual and to the preservation of the species. All other movements… by the individual members of the species are due to accident; they are not, according to Aristotle, the result of rule and management… Aristotle sees no difference between the falling of a leaf or a stone and the death of the good and noble people in the ship; nor does he distinguish between the destruction of a multitude of ants by an ox depositing on them his excrement and the death of worshippers killed by the fall of the house when its foundations give way.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17

Death, People, Way, Housing

“A methodical people," pulsed the voice of Kesa Khan. "They call themselves civilized because they can build tall castles and pitch their tents with geometric precision, but from here you can see the reality. Ants build in the same way. Are they civilized?”

David Gemmell book Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf

Source: Drenai series, Waylander II: In the Realm of the Wolf, Ch. 13

People, Way, Reality

“Looking backward on a period which is finished, we are looking at actually realized returns, costs, etc., as those items are registered in the bookkeeping of business. In such an ex post calculation there is, as we will show later, an exact balance between the invested waiting and the value of gross investment [Phil: he appears to mean savings and investment]. Looking forward there is no such balance except under certain conditions which remain to be ascertained. In the ex ante calculus it is a question not of realized results but of anticipations, calculations, and plans driving the dynamic process forward. Had this distinction been kept in mind, much confusion about “saving and investment” would have been avoided. There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation in which saving is increasing without a corresponding increase in investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 34

Question, Business, Appearance, Waiting

“I do not believe that the Great Society is the ordered, changeless, and sterile battalion of the ants. It is the excitement of becoming—always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again—but always trying and always gaining.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Inaugural address (1965)

“Advancement is very costly for the society, it’s not just an idea that occurs to philosophers, but the result of the interaction and collision between conservatism and futurism. If everybody were conservationists, the society would become inert like that of ants and bees, time flies and they never change”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

Idea, Bee, Change, Time

“The flower and fruit of love are mine
The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole”

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) poet, novelist, illustrator, performer

"The Boat"
Selected Poems (1962)

Love, Flowers

“Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit. And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop…”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Spider World: The Desert (1987), pp. 132-133

Life, Children, World, Question

“I leave Bud Fox in the canyons of Wall Street, just another ant, one of millions of ants…. We’re all absorbed in this system of capitalism…. You join the collective unconscious.”

Oliver Stone (1946) American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Wall Street DVD Director’s Commentary (2000)

“Up down / on summer's lake / the flying ant / finds a wall in the air”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Summer, Flying

“…Upon this, Sher Shah turned again towards Kalinjar… The Raja of Kalinjar, Kirat Sing, did not come out to meet him. So he ordered the fort to be invested, and threw up mounds against it, and in a short time the mounds rose so high that they overtopped the fort. The men who were in the streets and houses were exposed, and the Afghans shot them with their arrows and muskets from off the mounds. The cause of this tedious mode of capturing the fort was this. Among the women of Raja Kirat Sing was a Patar slave-girl, that is a dancing-girl. The king had heard exceeding praise of her, and he considered how to get possession of her, for he feared lest if he stormed the fort, the Raja Kirat Sing would certainly make a jauhar, and would burn the girl…
“On Friday, the 9th of RabI’u-l awwal, 952 A. H., when one watch and two hours of the day was over, Sher Shah called for his breakfast, and ate with his ‘ulama and priests, without whom he never breakfasted. In the midst of breakfast, Shaikh NizAm said, ‘There is nothing equal to a religious war against the infidels. If you be slain you become a martyr, if you live you become a ghazi.’ When Sher Shah had finished eating his breakfast, he ordered Darya Khan to bring loaded shells, and went up to the top of a mound, and with his own hand shot off many arrows, and said, ‘Darya Khan comes not; he delays very long.’ But when they were at last brought, Sher Shah came down from the mound, and stood where they were placed. While the men were employed in discharging them, by the will of Allah Almighty, one shell full of gunpowder struck on the gate of the fort and broke, and came and fell where a great number of other shells were placed. Those which were loaded all began to explode. Shaikh Halil, Shaikh Nizam, and other learned men, and most of the others escaped and were not burnt, but they brought out Sher Shah partially burnt. A young princess who was standing by the rockets was burnt to death. When Sher Shah was carried into his tent, all his nobles assembled in darbAr; and he sent for ‘Isa Khan Hajib and Masnad Khan Kalkapur, the son-in-law of Isa Khan, and the paternal uncle of the author, to come into his tent, and ordered them to take the fort while he was yet alive. When ‘Isa Khan came out and told the chiefs that it was Sher Shah’s order that they should attack on every side and capture the fort, men came and swarmed out instantly on every side like ants and locusts; and by the time of afternoon prayers captured the fort, putting every one to the sword, and sending all the infidels to hell. About the hour of evening prayers, the intelligence of the victory reached Sher Shah, and marks of joy and pleasure appeared on his countenance. Raja Kirat Sing, with seventy men, remained in a house. Kutb Khan the whole night long watched the house in person lest the Raja should escape. Sher Shah said to his sons that none of his nobles need watch the house, so that the Raja escaped out of the house, and the labour and trouble of this long watching was lost. The next day at sunrise, however, they took the Raja alive…””

Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545) founder of Sur Empire in Northern India

Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi of Abbas Khan Sherwani in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, Volume IV, pp. 407-09. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition

Death, Women, Men, War

“I had established an enviable scheme of life. I refused to dance attendance in the ante-chambers of the great. If anyone wanted something from me he had to ask. I was much run after, but if the person was not of rank, or a friend, I worked [painted] for nobody.”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

letter to his friend Don Martín Zapater, c. 1789; from: Francisco Zapater y Gomez : Goya; Noticias biograficas, Zaragoza, 1868, La Perse Verencia; as quoted in Francisco Goya, Hugh Stokes, Herbert Jenkins Limited Publishers, London, 1914, p. 182
1780s

Life, Dance, Painting, Personality

“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.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), p. 404

Love, Bird, Solitude, Sleep