As quoted in The Nazi Hunters by Neal Bascomb (2013). ISBN 978-0-545-56239-3.
“3523. Neither Fish, nor Flesh, nor good red Herring.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
"By Bread Alone", The New York Times Book Review (15 December 1974); quoted in The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes (Random House, 2008), p. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=GIdodweSSE4C&pg=PA42.
Vol. I, Book II, Ch. XI.
The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785)
Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), p. 310
As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
version in original Dutch / citaat van J. H. Weissenbruch, in het Nederlands: Heer en vriend Sala, - Het zalige genot door uwe vriendschap volop genoten.. .Toen ik gisteren weder de stad [Den Haag] had bereikt, had ik niet minder dan 12 maal de fluiten [vissen] uit den mand gelegt om dezen ten toon te stellen.. .Dien dag, vriend Sala, behoord onder de schoonste van mijn leven, alle oogenblikken hebben mij tot heden levendig gehouden, altijd zittende [vissen] in den boot, schommelende met den dobbers in 't gezicht..
Source: J. H. Weissenbruch', (n.d.), pp. 34-35
Chpt.3, p. 31
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1
Context: The most remarkable work of that period was published by Steno... The treatise bears the quaint title of 'De Solido intra Solidum contento naturaliter (1669,)' by which the author intended to express 'On Gems, Crystals, and organic Petrifactions enclosed within solid Rocks.'... Steno had compared the fossil shells with their recent analogues, and traced the various gradations from the state of mere calcification, when their natural gluten only was lost, to the perfect substitution of stony matter. He demonstrated that many fossil teeth found in Tuscany belonged to a species of shark; and he dissected, for the purpose of comparison, one of these fish recently taken from the Mediterranean. That the remains of shells and marine animals found petrified were not of animal origin was still a favorite dogma of many, who were unwilling to believe that the earth could have been inhabited by living beings long before many of the mountains were formed.
Address at Columbia University (1991)
Context: "Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
"Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
“What about pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, sheep?”
Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Summer 2010)
Context: Is slavery - owner, victim, profit, domination - exclusive to the human race? Have blacks, Jews, women and children been the only victims of this atrocity? Have not cows been enslaved? What about pigs, chickens, turkeys, fish, sheep? If they're not enslaved, then what are they? Free? Can slavery have a victim that is neither a human, nor an animal? Have not the oceans, the forests, the earth itself, become victims of ownership too?
“In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish”
"In Heraclitus' River"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: In Heraclitus' river
a fish has imagined the fish of all fish,
a fish kneels to the fish, a fish sings to the fish,
a fish begs the fish to ease its fishy lot.
We Are Still Married : Stories & Letters (1989),, "The Meaning of Life", p. 217 <!-- Viking -->
Context: To know and to serve God, of course, is why we're here, a clear truth, that, like the nose on your face, is near at hand and easily discernible but can make you dizzy if you try to focus on it hard. But a little faith will see you through. What else will do except faith in such a cynical, corrupt time? When the country goes temporarily to the dogs, cats must learn to be circumspect, walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith that all this woofing is not the last word. What is the last word, then? Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids — all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Revised edition, London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1889, p. 114
The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events (1848)
Context: Fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman.
“We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.”
Acceptance speech http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=leonardAcceptanceSpeech, National Book Critics Circle 2006 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (8 March 2007)
Context: My whole life I have been waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. From these writers, for almost 50 years, I have received narrative, witness, companionship, sanctuary, shock, and steely strangeness; good advice, bad news, deep chords, hurtful discrepancy, and amazing grace. At an average of five books a week, not counting all those sighed at and nibbled on before they go to the Strand, I will read 13,000. Then I'm dead. Thirteen thousand in a lifetime, about as many as there are new ones published every month in this country.
It's not enough, and yet rich to excess. The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them — not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agit-prop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff info-tainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish.
American Diplomacy (1951), World War I
Context: There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur.
As quoted in "Conversations with North American Indians" by Ted Poole in Who is the Chairman of This Meeting? : A Collection of Essays (1972) edited by Ralph Osborne, p. 43. In the article "When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money" http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/20/last-tree-cut/ "Quote Investigator" states that Greenpeace placed a paraphrased approximation on a banner in 1981, which has been widely propagated as a "Cree prophesy" or "Cree saying" and alternately attributed directly to Obomsawin, as in "A Thought for the Day" at Wordsmith (8 October 2014) http://wordsmith.org/words/virulent.html:
Context: Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
“Fishes next took the lead, then Reptiles”
Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 395-396
Context: The doctrine of progression... was thus given twelve years ago by Professor Sedgwick, in the preface to his Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cambridge. 'There are traces,' he says, 'among the old deposits of the earth of an organic progression among the successive forms of life. They are to be seen in the absence of mammalia in the older, and their very rare appearance in the newer secondary groups; in the diffusion of warm blooded quadrupeds (frequently of unknown genera) in the older tertiary system, and in their great abundance (and frequently of known genera) in the upper portions of the same series; and lastly, in the recent appearance of Man on the surface of the earth.' 'This historical development,' continues the same author, 'of the forms and functions of organic life during successive epochs, seems to mark a gradual evolution of creative power, manifested by a gradual ascent towards a higher type of being.' 'But the elevation of the fauna of successive periods was not made by transmutation, but by creative additions; and it is by watching these additions that we get some insight into Nature's true historical progress, and learn that there was a time when Cephalopoda were the highest types of animal life, the primates of this world; that Fishes next took the lead, then Reptiles; and that during the secondary period they were anatomically raised far above any forms of the reptile class now living in the world. Mammals were added next, until Nature became what she now is, by the addition of Man.... the generalisation, as laid down by the Woodwardian Professor, still holds good in all essential particulars.
The Clerk's Vision (1949)
Context: The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.
And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don't wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don't do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I'm guilty. Am I guilty? I'm innocent. (I'm innocent when I'm guilty, guilty when I'm innocent. I'm guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It's all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.
"The Pterodactyl" in Sky Hook #16, (Winter 1952-53); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)
Context: Sawbeaked epitome of bodiless
Idea, tossed by gusts of ether, dive
Through abstract mists and raid the sea of fact
Eat rich strange fish, grow long bright feathers, press
Form's flesh around thought's rib, and so derive
From the act of beauty, beauty of the act.
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”
"A River Runs Through It", p. 1
A River Runs Through It (1976)
Context: In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
“I loved to consider the care of God's Providence which extends even to the little fishes.”
Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)
Context: Every evening at the same hour when the weather was calm, I used to go on deck and bless God for all the wonders of His creation. I loved to consider the care of God's Providence which extends even to the little fishes.
Sermon V : The Self-Communication of God
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)
Context: We read in the Gospels that Our Lord fed many people with five loaves and two fishes. Speaking parabolically, we may say that the first loaf was — that we should know ourselves, what we have been everlastingly to God, and what we now are to Him. The second — that we should pity our fellow Christian who is blinded; his loss should grieve us as much as our own. The third — that we should know our Lord Jesus Christ's life, and follow it to the utmost of our capacity. The fourth — that we should know the judgments of God. … The fifth is — that we should know the Godhead which has flowed into the Father and filled Him with joy, and which has flowed into the Son and filled Him with wisdom, and the Two are essentially one.
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 78
Part Troll (2004)
What is Religion? (1893)
Context: I only hope you may be able not only to listen, but also to hear me. Your charity must multiply my small voice and do some such miracle as was done when the loaves and fishes fed the multitude in the ancient tune which has just been spoken of.
A Door in the Hive (1989), Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
Context: All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulcher, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food — fish and a honeycomb.
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.
Context: The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once.
“Leviathan is not the biggest fish; — I have heard of Krakens.”
Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 1851); published in Memories of Hawthorne (1897) by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, p. 158
Context: I am heartily sorry I ever wrote anything about you — it was paltry. Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing. So, now, let us add Moby-Dick to our blessing, and step from that. Leviathan is not the biggest fish; — I have heard of Krakens.
A Door in the Hive (1989), Flickering Mind
Context: You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow.
You the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?
Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 57.
Context: I have no perfect panacea for human ills. And even if I had I would not attempt to present a system of philosophy between the soup and fish, but this much I will say: The distinctively modern custom of marital bundling is the doom of chivalry and death of passion. It wears all tender sentiment to a napless warp, and no wonder is it that the novelist, without he has a seared and bitter heart, hesitates to follow the couple beyond the church door. There is no greater reproach to our civilization than the sight of men joking the boy whose heart is pierced by the first rays of a life-giving sun, or of our expecting a girl to blush because she is twice God's child today she was yesterday.
“When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time”
Evolution (1895; 1909)
Context: When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.
The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649)
"The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic ideas", p. 26
The Denial of Death (1973)
On nature in “Edmonia Lewis https://americanart.si.edu/artist/edmonia-lewis-2914 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
"The Psychology of Altruism", p. 308–309
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship
Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Preponderance of Egoism, pp. 123–125
1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
“Fish and visitors stink in three days.”
Adapted 16th century writer John Lyly's line http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/03/ben-franklins-best-epigrams/ found in Euphues – the Anatomy of Wit: Fish and guests in three days are stale.
Attributed
Source: The Unfinished Autobiography (1951), Chapter IV - Part 1
Source: What Every Girl Should Know (1913), Chapter 4, "Sexual Impulses--Part II", p. 47.
II, 4
Moralia, Of Eating of Flesh
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/san-marzanos-the-bible-of-tomatoes/2013/08/12/85485c1a-fa32-11e2-9bde-7ddaa186b751_story.html
“Because he loves pussy. Except it smells like fish!”
Is... Not Nicole Kidman (2005)
“Gene Ray: Another thing, did you know your father is a fish?”
'Interviewer: No, I did not know my... [laughter]
Gene Ray: You know how salmon swim upstream, the male fertilizes the female eggs laid in the water?
Interviewer: Yes.
Gene Ray: The sperm fish swims upstream just like the salmon fertilizes female eggs laid in the water.
Radio KoL interview, April 9, 2004
Footnote: Here we see the working of another Law of Nature: No water, no fish.
The Plesiosaur
How to Become Extinct (1941)
Introduction to the Enlarged Edition
1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947; 1983)
“As fish cannot live without water, so guerrillas cannot live without the people.”
With the century, vol. 5
" Time, Self and Sleeping Beauty https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282052756_Time_Self_and_Sleeping_Beauty" (2008), p. 44
Interview in the documentary-film Cowspiracy by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn (2014).
Interview in the documentary-film Cowspiracy by Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn (2014).
September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)
It was not among the number of possibles, that animal life should be exempted from mortality: omnipotence itself could not have made it capable of eternalization [sic] and indissolubility; for the self same nature which constitutes animal life, subjects it to decay and dissolution; so that the one cannot be without the other, any more than there could be a compact number of mountains without vallies [sic], or that I could exist and not exist at the same time, or that God should effect any other contradiction in nature...
Ch. III Section IV - Of Physical Evils
Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784)
Speech given by Johnson at Lloyd's of London in 2006, quoted in * 2007-07-18
Boris Johnson inspired by Jaws mayor
Graeme Wilson and George Jones
The Telegraph
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1557765/Boris-Johnson-inspired-by-Jaws-mayor.html
2000s, 2006
“The salmon may be cited as typically fish-shaped fish.”
Aerodynamics, constituting the first volume of a complete work on aerial flight (1906), Chapter 1, page 33
[Van Doren, Mark, The travels of William Bartram, An American Bookshelf, volume 3, 118–119, 1928, New York, Macy-Masius, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b281934&view=1up&seq=124]
Travels of William Bartram (1791)
“Modern Philosophers, that wisely keep to sandy shallows, like shrimps, for fear of bigger fish.”
Vol. II, Ch. V Aphorisms and Extracts, p. 76.
Memoirs and Correspondence (1900)
Source: Nancy Knowlton https://web.archive.org/web/20081008104046/http://www.smithsonianmag.com:80/specialsections/ocean-hall/atm-qa-200809.html (September 2008)
Source: By the Waters of Babylon (1937)
Source: How we wrecked the ocean https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson_how_we_wrecked_the_ocean (April 2010)
Source: Four billion years of evolution in six minutes https://www.ted.com/talks/prosanta_chakrabarty_four_billion_years_of_evolution_in_six_minutes (April 2018)
Source: Clues to prehistoric times, found in blind cavefish https://www.ted.com/talks/prosanta_chakrabarty_clues_to_prehistoric_times_found_in_blind_cavefish (February 2016)
“You're dog water, boxed like a fish. I set this up and you lost so fast.”
Source: Words during battle, Quoted in Francis Parkman's Wolfe
In response to a question in the House of Commons about the fishing industry losing money due to Brexit red tape https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2021-01-14/debates/329F59AC-D8A3-464D-AF4D-58C7EAA560C6/BusinessOfTheHouse#contribution-F5E677D7-58DE-4634-88A4-E97E2AA8F7E6 (14 January 2021)
2021
Letter to Bernard Berenson (13 September 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
"The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)
“Being a big fish in a small pond is great until you have to poop.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
“Sell a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will put you out of a job.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy (2016)
Sometimes we saw this picture continued still farther, when the poor fugitives met with another set of enemies in the air, and became the prey of birds, by endeavouring to escape the jaws of fishes.
Book I, ch. II, The Passage from Madeira to the Cape Verd Islands, and from thence to the Cape of Good Hope.
A Voyage Round the World (1777)
From "I Never Wrote for Children," by P. L. Travers, in the New York Times Magazine, July 2, 1978.
The Inner Lives of "Food Animals" https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-inner-lives-of-food-animals/ (March 16, 2017)
“I got to be quite the fish, I must say.”
Little Bit of This, Little Bit of That https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-sep-29-he-37343-story.html (September 29, 1997)
“If we didn't have quotas there would be overfishing and we would have no fish left.”
EU referendum: Leavers 'want to have cake and eat it', Elizabeth Truss claims https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36512743 BBC News (12 June 2016)
2016
On doing things that scare her in “Who is Dmae Roberts?” https://artslandia.com/who-is-dmae-roberts/ in artslandia
Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 4 (p. 49)
Source: Shane J. Cronin (2022) cited in: " Interview: Tonga volcanic eruption not likely to cause global climate change, says New Zealand volcanologist http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/asiapacific/20220118/dc046e9e38e343a381668086f1b71d0e/c.html" in Xinhua Net, 18 January 2022.
Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)
"Kim Sharma: New vegan on the block" https://web.archive.org/web/20140113154535/http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-08-12/news-interviews/28205180_1_vegetarian-diet-kim-sharma-bollywood-stars, The Times of India (12 August 2009).
"Go vegetarian, pleads Yana Gupta in new ad" https://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jan/29peta.htm, Rediff.com (29 January 2004).
