Quotes about frog (106 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there ’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They ’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“We are born princes and the civilizing process makes us frogs.”

Eric Berne (1910–1970) Canadian psychiatrist

“As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest.”

Edgar Allan Poe book Hop-Frog

"Hop-Frog" (1850).

“Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Learning

“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”

Terry Pratchett book Lords and Ladies

Source: Lords and Ladies

People , Cats

“You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.”

Terry Pratchett book Witches Abroad

Source: Witches Abroad (1991)

People , World , Girl

“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Women , Children , World , Beauty

“If I try harder I might be reincarnated as a lonely virgin hiding behind a cartoon frog.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

January 2017 tweet, as reported by Ian Cheong of Heat Street https://heatst.com/entertainment/harry-potter-author-j-k-rowling-calls-trump-supporter-a-lonely-virgin/
2010s

“Honestly, I've been making up everything as I go. When you're riding the ice pony, you see a lot of talking frogs.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

[The New York Times, October 24, 2015, Jim Henson, Puppeteer, Dies; The Muppets' Creator Was 53, Eleanor, Blau, May 17, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/17/obituaries/jim-henson-puppeteer-dies-the-muppets-creator-was-53.html?pagewanted=all]

“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”

Mark Twain book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865)

“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”

Mark Twain book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; first published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press, 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in The Californian; first anthologized in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 (1867), ed. John Paul

“The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Restriction
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

People , Question , Universe

“I don't like 'em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin' frogs gay!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

"Alex Jones: The Gay Bomb Rant" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpiUfb7adPE&feature=youtu.be&t=5m39s, October 2015.
Context: What do you think tap water is? It's a gay bomb, baby. And I'm not saying people didn't naturally have homosexual feelings. I'm not even getting into it, quite frankly. I mean, give me a break. Do you think I'm like, oh, shocked by it, so I'm up here bashing it because I don't like gay people? I don't like 'em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin' frogs gay! Do you understand that? I'm sick of being social engineered, it's not funny!

Water

“I was in the middle of a dream about garbage cans and frogs - don't ask, and I won't tell.”

Patricia Briggs book Bone Crossed

Source: Bone Crossed

Dreams

“Not a frog, I hope?” he asked…She shook her head. “No. And if it was I wouldn’t kiss it, I promise you. I might kiss a prince if I could be sure he’d turn into a frog, but not the other way around.”

Eva Ibbotson book A Song for Summer

Source: A Song for Summer

Hope , Way , Kiss

“Rachel, Rachel, Rachel,” he said, very still and unmoving. “Always jumping to the wrong conclusion. You’re like a frog, you know.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Pale Demon

“If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.”

Loren Eiseley (1907–1977) US philosopher (1907-1977)

Departure , Tree

“… you cannot eat every tadpole and frog in the pond, but you can eat the biggest and ugliest one, and that will be enough, at least for the time being.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Source: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Time

“Old dark sleepy pool…
Quick unexpected frog
Goes plop! Watersplash!”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Source: Japanese Haiku

“no more pep talks about believing in toads," Liza said.
"Don't they turn into princeses when you kiss them?" Bonnie said.
"Thats frogs," Liza Said. "Entirely different species.”

Jennifer Crusie book Bet Me

Source: Bet Me

Kiss

“Around us the night creatures have their say. We are surrounded by a symphony of crickets and frogs. Neither of us feels the need to speak, and I suppose that is one of the qualities I find comforting in Kartik. We can be alone together.”

Libba Bray book The Sweet Far Thing

Source: The Sweet Far Thing

Feeling , Night

“In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the pricesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.”

Paulo Coelho book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994)
Variant: There's nothing deeper than love. In fairy tales, the princesses kiss the frogs, and the frogs become princes. In real life, the princesses kiss princes, and the princes turn into frogs.
Source: By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

Life , Kiss , Princess

“As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.
But the frogs die in earnest.”

Joanna Russ book The Female Man

Part 8, Chapter 10 (p. 196)
Source: Fiction, The Female Man (1975)

Boy

“You can keep your willpower, Frog. I am going home to bake a cake.”

Arnold Lobel book Frog and Toad Together

Source: Frog and Toad Together

Home

“What happens to me if this slipper fits?"
"I turn you into a handsome frog.”

Judith McNaught (1944) American writer

Source: Double Standards

“(Looking at their son on ultrasound.)
He looks like an angel. (Cassandra)
I don’t know. I think he looks like a frog or something. (Wulf)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Angels , Thinking

“If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."
This is another way of saying that if you have two important tasks before you, start with the biggest, hardest, and most important task first.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Source: Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Way

“It's all very romantic," Gabriel said, and then frowned. "Or it would be, if my brother could get a word out without sounding like a choking frog. I fear he will not go down in history as one of the world's greatest wooers of women.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Women , World , Fear , History

“You can't discuss the ocean with a well frog - he's limited by the space he lives in. You can't discuss ice with a summer insect - he's bound to a single season.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Source: The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Summer , Season

“The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things,
I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever

from, One or Two Things”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Dream Work

God , Dogs , Grass , Time

“I read once that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog," Mark said. "You find out how it works, but the frog dies in the process.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Reading

“He wanted to believe that his own lack of movement had stopped all movement in the world, the way a hibernating frog abolishes winter.”

Kóbó Abe book The Woman in the Dunes

Part 1, Ch. 8
Source: The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

World , Way , Winter

“I don't play the tuba. The tuba plays me. My tuba is not actually a tuba, because it has never produced a musical sound. It is actually a giant frog pretending to be a tuba.”

David Klass book You Don't Know Me

Source: You Don't Know Me

Music

“You don't always have to kiss a lot of frogs to recognize a prince when you find one

-Henrietta Barett”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: Minx

Kiss

“Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone's years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: "That's what you are! That's what you are!" What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.”

Anton Chekhov book In the Ravine

Source: In the Ravine (1900), Ch. 8, pp. 224

Life , Spring , Bird , Sleep

“[Why do animals] undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace... The explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.”

Francis Maitland Balfour (1851–1882) British biologist

Comparative Embryology, p. 702. (1880)

Fish , Change , Time , Animals

“From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.”

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

Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary (1988)

World , Boy , Literature , Learning

“A frog in a well cannot conceive of the ocean.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

“In approaching a problem a Marxist should see the whole as well as the parts. A frog in a well says, “The sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well.” That is untrue, for the sky is not just the size of the mouth of the well. If it said, “A part of the sky is the size of the mouth of a well”, that would be true, for it tallies with the facts.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

“On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism” (December 27, 1935)

Problem , Parting

“I will not be lickin a frog, so there's nothin' to worry about”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 2 Episode 4
On Nature

“Design demands a designer. Frogs don’t turn into princes, and “big bangs” make big messes not neat, orderly universes. There are no facts to support evolutionism. It stands royally naked.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Support , Universe

“The scientist who considers himself absolutely "objective" and believes that he can free himself from the compulsion of the "merely" subjective should try — only in imagination of course — to kill in succession a lettuce, a fly, a frog, a guineapig, a cat, a dog, and finally a chimpanzee. He will then be aware how increasingly difficult murder becomes as the victim's level of organisation rises. The degree of inhibition against killing each one of these beings is a very precise measure for the considerably different values that we cannot help attributing to lower and higher forms of life. To any man who finds it equally easy to chop up a live dog and a live lettuce I would recommend suicide at his earliest convenience!”

Konrad Lorenz book On Aggression

Source: On Aggression (1963), Ch. XII : On the Virtue of Scientific Humility

Life , Dogs , Imagination , Cats

“Thus use your frog…Put your hook through his mouth, and out at his gills;…and then with a fine needle and silk sew the upper part of his leg, with only one stitch, to the arming-wire of your hook; or tie the frog's leg, above the upper joint, to the armed-wire; and in so doing use him as though you loved him.”

Izaak Walton book The Compleat Angler

Part I, ch. 8.
The Compleat Angler (1653-1655)

Love , Parting

“You can be an ugly baby and everyone goes awww innit nice? There was some women in a cafe the other week that I was sat in, and she came up and she sat down with her mate and she was talkin' loudly goin' on about oh the baby's lovely. They said it's got, er, lovely big eyes, er, really big hands and feet. Now that doesn't sound like a nice baby to me. I felt like sayin' it sounds like a frog. But I thought I dont know her, there's only so much you can say to a stranger. I dont know what kept me from sayin' it.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

The Podfather Trilogy, Episode 1 Halloween
On Life

Love , Women , Baby

“Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

"Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
A very similar remark is often attributed to White, but may actually be a paraphrased version of the above statement: "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

“In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journals IA 328, 1835
1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Men , Age , Idea , Past

“The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.”

John Green book Paper Towns

Quentin "Q" Jacobsen, p. 3
Paper Towns (2008)

Way , Housing , Sea

“Once you've dissected a joke, you're about where you are when you've dissected a frog. It's dead.”

Isaac Asimov book Banquets of the Black Widowers

Banquets of the Black Widowers (1984), p. 49; comparable to "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." — E. B. White, in "Some Remarks on Humor," preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941)
General sources

Dead

“Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crushes it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures are best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 383

Life , Death , Pain , Family

“Our national goals involve leap-frogging from a state of economic backwardness and social disabilities attempting to achieve in a few decades a change which has incidentally taken centuries in other countries and in other lands. This involves innovative at all levels.”

Vikram Sarabhai (1919–1971) (1919-1971), Indian physicist

In the post-Nehru era with his vision on “Television and Development” quoted in [Joshi, Puran Chandra, Communication and National Development, http://books.google.com/books?id=re46IrFLtQ8C&pg=PR25, 1 January 2002, Anamika Publishers & Distributors, 978-81-7975-013-1, xxv]page xxv.

Change , Country

“If you find it hard to believe that there was an Intelligent Designer, give this some thought. Man, with all his genius, can’t make a rock, a leaf, a flower, a living singing bird, a croaking frog, or even a grain of dead sand from nothing. We can recreate, but we can’t create anything material from nothing, living or dead. Not a thing. Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world’s hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can’t make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that’s true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Hunger , World , Intelligence , Flowers

“For myself, I detest the fellow, and think him a charlatan. I am certain that, in spite of his frogs, he is making no real progress in physics.”

Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) Russian writer

Source: Father and Sons (1862), Ch. 10.

Thinking

“The pike does not ask the frog’s permission before dining.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Lini
(15 October 1994)

““We can only hope.”
“That’s like the frog said when he seen the stork.””

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Source: Fiction, The Book of the New Sun (1980–1983), The Urth of the New Sun (1987), Chapter 46, "The Runaway (p. 328)

Hope

“Glenn Beck: Frog Killer … Glenn Beck Lies About LGF … Beck portrayed this as if I accused him — literally — of killing a frog.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

September 24, 2009 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/34746_Glenn_Beck_Lies_About_LGF&only

“In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.”

Tim Powers book Expiration Date

Source: Expiration Date (1995), Chapter 15 (p. 100)

Dead

“At no point am I going to lick a little frogs head.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast Series 2 Episode 4
On Nature

“Too hard for any frog's digestion,
To have his froghood call'd in question!”

Christopher Smart (1722–1771) English poet

The Duellist

Question

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God , War , People , Books

“I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs. But I accept, with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time, that showers of an edible substance that has not been traced to an origin upon this earth, have fallen from the sky, in Asia Minor.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 3 http://www.resologist.net/lo103.htm; part of this has sometimes been misquoted as: "I cannot accept that the products of the mind are subject-matter for belief."
Lo! (1931)

Wisdom , Age , Freedom , Teachers

“That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.”

Karl Pilkington (1972) English television personality, social commentator, actor, author and former radio producer

Podcast
On Aesop's Fables

Problem , Animals

“I had built a little cabin in Yosemite, and for convenience in getting water, and for the sake of music and society, I led a small stream from Yosemite Creek into it. Running along the side of the wall it was not in the way, and it had just fall enough to ripple and sing in low, sweet tones, making delightful company, especially at night when I was lying awake. Then a few frogs came in and made merry with the stream, — and one snake.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 6: Among the Animals of the Yosemite

Music , Way , Lying , Water

“Flies can eat toads! (Although astonishment may be lessened in noting that the tiny toads are much smaller than enormous fly larvae.) Unusually large insects and maximally small vertebrates have also been featured in the few other recorded cases of such reversals - frogs, small birds, even a mouse, consumed by praying mantids, for example.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 396
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Bird , Flying

“I looked at the high walls where once-white paint had grayed and then peeled. Barbara had always said the house had good bones, and she was right about that; but it had no heart, not with us living inside it. In place of laughter, trust, and joy, there was a hollow emptiness, a kind of rot, and I marveled at my blindness. Was it the alcohol, I wondered, that had made it bearable? Or was it something else, some inner failing? Maybe it was neither. They say that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he'll hop right out. But put the same frog into cold water and slowly turn up the heat, and he'll sit quietly until his blood begins to boil. He'll let himself be cooked alive. Maybe that's how it was for me. Maybe I was like that frog.”

John Hart (1965) American author with multiple books and awards

Source: The King of Lies (2006), Ch. 31.

Alcohol , Laughter , Water , Heart

“Boys throw stones at frogs in fun, but the frogs do not die in fun, but in earnest.”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

Variant translation: Boys throw stones at frogs for fun, but the frogs don't die for "fun", but in sober earnest.
As quoted by Plutarch, Moralia, xii. 66

Boy

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml)
2000s, 2001

Life , Men , People , Education

“Society presses upon us all the time. The progress of the last half century is the progress of the frog out of his well.”

R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) writer of Indian English literature

"Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians" at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html

Time

“Pioneering is an unlimited chance to become the biggest frog, provided the puddle is small enough.”

Poul Anderson book The Enemy Stars

Source: The Enemy Stars (1959), Chapter 5 (p. 31)

Chance

“Can you make honey, from nothing? How about a glass of milk, from nothing? How about a living leaf? Can you make a living frog, or a cat, a horse or a cow, from nothing? How about an eye? Make me a fully functioning eye, using no materials. Can you? Of course you can't. You don't even have an intelligent answer for how those came about. You would probably say that evolution is responsible for everything, but that it didn't make it from nothing. It made it from gases in space. Then where did the gases come from? You have to keep saying that there was something in the beginning, because basic science says that nothing can come from nothing.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

Intelligence , Cats , Science , Horse

“Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Bios

Source: Bios (1999), Chapter 25 (p. 194)

Life , Flying

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter IV

Death , Men , Dreams , Color

“All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts.”

Evelyn Waugh book The Loved One

First lines
The Loved One (1948)

Music , Support , Sun , Heart

“It was the saying of Bion, that though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Which are the most crafty, Water or Land Animals?, 7
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Boy , Sport

“An amphibophile is the sort of girl who goes around kissing princes in the hope that one of them will turn into a frog.”

Michael Kurland book The Unicorn Girl

Source: The Unicorn Girl (1969), Chapter 10 (p. 137)

Hope , Girl , Kiss

“By dipping in the river everyday a Brahmin were to jump to heaven, the frog which is born and lives in water should surely go to heaven.”

Sarvajna Kannada poet, pragmatist and philosopher

Tripadis

Water

“In May 2004, a fourteen-year-old boy at a middle-class intermediate school in Walnut Creek, an upper-middle-class suburb east of San Francisco, was detained by police who stormed his clasroom, cuffed him in front of the students and teachers, and frog-marched him across the quad… for posting a flash cartoon on his web home page. […] A few years earlier the kid would have been given a serious sit-down, but today, America has no patience for touchy-feely liberal crap. If you step out of line, Team America will be called in to destroy you.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 176-177.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)

School , Home , Boy , Teachers

“Just as the purpose of eating is to satisfy hunger, not greed, so the sex instinct is designed for the propagation of the species according to natural law, never for the kindling of insatiable longings. Destroy wrong desires now; otherwise they will follow you after the astral body is torn from its physical casing. Even when the flesh is weak, the mind should be constantly resistant. If temptation assails you with cruel force, overcome it by impersonal analysis and indomitable will. Every natural passion can be mastered. Conserve your powers. Be like the capacious ocean, absorbing within all the tributary rivers of the senses. Small yearnings are openings in the reservoir of your inner peace, permitting healing waters to be wasted in the desert soil of materialism. The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; see that the frogs of weakness don't kick you around.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Hunger , World , Peace , Law

“In deduction the mind is under the dominion of a habit or association by virtue of which a general idea suggests in each case a corresponding reaction. This is the way the hind legs of a frog separated from the rest of the body, reason, when you pinch them. It is the lowest form of psychical manifestation.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Law of Mind (1892)

Way , Idea

“Don't you know that I'm not joking?
Aah, you think you won't, I think you will.
Don't you know that this tongue can kill?
C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon.
Lady kiss that frog.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Kiss That Frog
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

Kiss , Thinking

“Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 5, “Monster Becoming Mortal Again” (p. 50)

Thinking , Baby

“Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.”

Norman Spinrad book The Void Captain's Tale

Source: The Void Captain's Tale (1983), Chapter 10 (pp. 117-118)

Hope , Bird , Tree , Flying

“How dreary — to be — Somebody!
How public — like a Frog —
To tell one's name — the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

288: I'm Nobody! Who are you?; In some editions "June" has been altered to "day".
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

“Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from
one's lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

"Instructions", first published in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales (2000) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Sister

“Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the sniveling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime.
I could curse for hours and hours — God help me.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Letter to Edward Garnett, expressing anger that his manuscript for Sons and Lovers was rejected by Heinemann (3 July 1912)

God , Hate , Swine , Help

““How does one conquer fear, Don B.?”
“One takes a frog and sews it to one’s shoe,” he said.
“The left or the right?”
Don B. gave me a pitying look.
“Well, you’d look mighty funny going down the street with only one frog sewed to your shoes, wouldn’t you?" he said. “One frog on each shoe.””

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge”, pp. 7–8.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Fear , Shoe

“Natur duz awl her big and little jobs without making enny furse; the earth goes around the sun, the moon changes, the eklipses, and the pollywog, silently and taillessly, bekums a frog, but man kant even deliver a small-sized 4th ov July orashun without knocking down a mountain or two, and tareing up three or four primeval forests by the bleeding rutes.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Mountain , Nature , Change , Sun

“"If you believe in a God, miss, pray now." "You don't?" "I believe in the Baker rifle and in the 1796 Pattern heavy cavalry sword, so long as you grind down the back blade so that the point don't slide off a Frog's ribs. If you you don't grind down the back blade, miss, then you might as well just beat the bastards to death with it."”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain Richard Sharpe and Miss Sarah Fry, p. 205
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)

Death , God

“There exists in society a very special class of persons that I have always referred to as the Believers. These are folks who have chosen to accept a certain religion, philosophy, theory, idea or notion and cling to that belief regardless of any evidence that might, for anyone else, bring it into doubt. They are the ones who encourage and support the fanatics and the frauds of any given age. No amount of evidence, no matter how strong, will bring them any enlightenment. They are the sheep who beg to be fleeced and butchered, and who will battle fiercely to preserve their right to be victimized… the U. S. Patent Office handles an endless succession of inventors who still produce perpetual-motion machines that don't work, but no number of idle flywheels will convince these zealots of their folly; dozens of these patent applications flow in every year. In ashrams all over the world, hopping devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will never abandon their goal of blissful levitation of their bodies by mind power, despite bruises and sprains aplenty suffered as they bounce about on gym mats like demented (though smiling) frogs, trying to get airborne. Absolutely nothing will discourage them.”

James Randi (1928) Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic

The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mask_of_Nostradamus, p. 140–142.

Age , World , Religion , Smile

“He is such a hysteric that they ne ed not take him seriously, and so he will not carry out his threat unfortunately. But it is all or nothing for him now. If I know him, he will make one desperate attempt to get into power. If this fails and he does not get his way, he is finished. He will burst into pieces like a frog.”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

About Adolf Hitler as quoted in "Diary of a Man in Despair", Fritz Percy Reck-Malleczewen - History (1970) p. 95.

Way

“Right now I’m working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn’t give too many details or the next thing you know it’s on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I’ll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache.”

David Mitchell (1969) English novelist

Interview in The Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6034/the-art-of-fiction-no-204-david-mitchell

Books , Change

“The old pond:
A frog jumps in,—
The sound of the water.”

Bashō Matsuo Frog Poem

古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音
furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
Classical Japanese Database, Translation #64 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/64 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth)
At the ancient pond
the frog plunges into
the sound of water
Translation: Sam Hamill
Old pond,
leap-splash –
a frog.
Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 58 (Translation: Lucien Stryk)
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water –
A deep resonance.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, London, 1966, p. 9 (Translation: Nobuyuki Yuasa)
Individual poems

Water

“I’ve grown up with animals in the house, I have 3 brothers and 3 sisters, and all of us had cats, dogs, mice, chickens, frogs, tortoises, so they’ve always been a big part of my life. My dog, Scamp, was my best friend when I was growing up, and he was just as much a brother to me as my human brothers. Someone threw acid on him, and he almost died, but my parents spent their life savings having him treated. It appalled me that people could be so cruel, and ever since I have stuck up for animals. It is something I can be active in, unlike trying to figure out the appalling things humans do to each other.”

Geezer Butler (1949) English musician, bassist and lyricist of Black Sabbath

“Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler,” interview with Devils Gate Media (24 March 2016) http://devilsgatemedia.com/interview-black-sabbaths-geezer-butler/.

Life , People , Dogs , Cats

“Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water-bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud-turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb, brooks to wade in, water-lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hay-fields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of his education.
By being well acquainted with all these they come into most intimate harmony with nature, whose lessons are, of course, natural and wholesome.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Education , Nature , Tree , Water

“Ascended Kynthos alone, the cave of Apollo – half-way magnificent and majestic. A pool with fine fig trees nearby full of giant (sacred?) toads – leaping and barking. Also green frogs.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

1961 - 1975

Way , Tree

“The Franks had all been German at first, but some of them had taken to eating frogs and snails and were gradually turning into Frenchmen, a fact not generally known at the time because there were no French as yet.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part III: Strange Bedfellows, Charlemagne

Time

“In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 81, p. 505

God

“You could say it like was like a fairy tale at the time; Andy would be the good fairy, and Jim would play the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog who turns into a prince, no, it would have to be the other way round.”

Nico (1938–1988) German musician, model and actress, one of Warhol's superstars

Describing her tumultuous experiences of 1967, as quoted in Life and Lies of an Icon (1995) by Richard Witts.
Context: You could say it like was like a fairy tale at the time; Andy would be the good fairy, and Jim would play the giant, Brian would be the witch, Paul McCartney would be the frog who turns into a prince, no, it would have to be the other way round. Well, it didn't seem like a fairy tale at the time. It was a lot of hassle. But I learned a lot of things, and I began to compose my own songs.

Way , Time

“The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Under the Microscope (1872)
Context: The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox.