Quotes about foal (7 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"To a Young Ass", li. 1 (1794)

Love , Patience

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Paradise (1997)

Love , Life , God , Marriage

“Click. The spare camera was now focussed and working. The lead mare—Barb Nose's—saw the drop. She cut her stride and wheeled and ran along the dangerous edge. Barb Nose ran in the vanguard, protecting the rear, driving the foals ahead of him. Blaze Face had long since cut and run, taking his beaten stallion flesh off to be nursed, to wait for another day, another elder to challenge. The other mares expertly and instinctively followed the leader as she rimmed the mesa, heading for the foothills of the El Gatos. One foal, too, made the cut, on stick-like legs, frightened but blindly following. The second foal had truly been blinded by panic. He strode to the drop-off and never stopped. He was a wild horse, and he had to run, and now he would run free forever. Plunging headlong over the drop, body whirling, his legs still flailing, as he fell through the desert air and past the serrated rock walls of the mesa, he knew nothing of time. He knew nothing of the eons that had gone before him, building this mesa of bluff and sandstone and archean rock. He fell through layers of time, to timelessness, a living thing for so little time. Once a living work of art, now a broken artifact. One foal. Dead. Murdered by man. Murdered by time. The drumbeat of the earth was lessened by one horse's tiny hooves. And all of us were lessened by this new silence. Click.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From Running Wild, pp. 14-15
Other Topics

Art , Silence , Time , Waiting

“Belistiche, a woman from the coast of Macedonia, won with the pair of foals … at the hundred and twenty-ninth Olympics.”

Pausanias (110–180) Ancient Greek geographer

Description of Greece, Eleia VIII, 11 [Loeb].

“You have seen bigger horses than his thirteen and a half, perhaps fourteen hands, his nine hundred pounds. You have seen handsomer profiles than this Roman nose, slightly convex. Burrs cling to his long sweeping tail. His coat is dark and unglossed. Yet look again, while he is still, for he will not be still long. Sense the vitality in those muscles, trembling beneath the skin; see the pride in that high head, hear the haughty command to his voice. For this is a wild horse, my friend. Once he claimed the western range. Then they took his range away from him. But nothing, no one claims him. He feels the wind and the air with his nose, with his ears, with his very soul, and what he feels is good. He tosses his head, once, quickly, and behind him his harem of six mares trot up to join him, and behind them, a yearling colt, a filly and two stork-legged foals. Coats dusty and chewed, tails spiked with bits of the desert, sage and nettle and leftover pine needles from winter climbs down from timberland. The Barb-nosed stallion led his family down to the waterhole. Not Barb from barbed wire, though perhaps the chewed skin was from barbed wire, but Barb from the Spanish horses from which he descended, brought to the New World over four hundred years ago, from the Barbary states of North Africa, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Fez, Tripoli. Indians stole them from the Spaniards; the Barbs stole themselves free from the Indians. Running wild, a few still run free.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From Running Wild (1973) by Hano, p. 10
Other Topics

World , Family , Feeling , Soul

“We see that kindness or humanity has a larger field than bare justice to exercise itself in; law and justice we cannot, in the nature of things, employ on others than men; but we may extend our goodness and charity even to irrational creatures; and such acts flow from a gentle nature, as water from an abundant spring. It is doubtless the part of a kind-natured man to keep even worn-out horses and dogs, and not only take care of them when they are foals and whelps, but also when they are grown old.”

Plutarch book Parallel Lives

Marcus Cato (Dryden translation)
Parallel Lives

Men , Justice , Law , Dogs

“There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it — it took a man to do that.”

Stephen Vincent Benét book The Devil and Daniel Webster

Source: The Devil and Daniel Webster (1937)
Context: Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was — an ordinary man who'd had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he'd wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn't help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. And he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it — it took a man to do that.
The fire began to die on the hearth and the wind before morning to blow. The light was getting gray in the room when Dan'l Webster finished. And his words came back at the end to New Hampshire ground, and the one spot of land that each man loves and clings to. He painted a picture of that, and to each one of that jury he spoke of things long forgotten. For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something. And when Dan'l Webster finished he didn't know whether or not he'd saved Jabez Stone. But he knew he'd done a miracle. For the glitter was gone from the eyes of the judge and jury, and, for the moment, they were men again, and knew they were men.

Sadness , Feeling , Failure , Hell