Quotes about lamb (149 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The Christian, however, must bear the burden of a brother. He must suffer and endure the brother. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated. The burden of men was so heavy for God Himself that He had to endure the Cross. God verily bore the burden of men in the body of Jesus Christ. But He bore them as a mother carries her child, as a shepherd enfolds the lost lamb that has been found. God took men upon Himself and they weighted Him to the ground, but God remained with them and they with God. In bearing with men God maintained fellowship with them. It was the law of Christ that was fulfilled in the Cross. And Christians must share in this law.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Men , God , Law , Suffering

“Even the wolf has its moments of weakness, in which it sides with the lamb and thinks: I hope it runs away.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) Argentine novelist

"El mismo lobo tiene momentos de debilidad, en que se pone del lado del cordero y piensa: Ojalá que huya."
Guirnaldas con amores, 1959.

Hope , Thinking , Wolf

“Though lions to their enemies they were lambs to their friends.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

The infernal Marriage, part 2, Chapter 4 (1834).
Books

“Esaias says: “The wolf also shall feed with the lamb, and the leopard shall take his rest with the kid; the calf also, and the bull, and the lion shall eat together; and a little boy shall lead them. …” I am quite aware that some persons endeavour to refer these words to the case of savage men, both of different nations and various habits, who come to believe, and when they have believed, act in harmony with the righteous. But although this is [true] now with regard to some men coming from various nations to the harmony of the faith, nevertheless in the resurrection of the just [the words shall also apply] to those animals mentioned. For God is rich in all things. And it is right that when the creation is restored, all the animals should … revert to the food originally given by God … that is, the productions of the earth.”

Irenaeus (130–202) Bishop and saint

Book 5, Chapter 33, Section 4. Translated by Philip Schaff et al. (full text at Wikisource).
Against Heresies

Men , God , Faith , Food

“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The Gulag Archipelago

The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

Imagination

“Since you cannot mix wolves with sheep, why would anyone dare to compare a lion with the lamb?”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of all the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.”

Giorgos Seferis (1900–1971) Greek poet and diplomat

Source: "Greek poet's odyssey", 17 Jan 1964, LIFE Magazine, ‎Vol. 56, No. 3, Page 75.

Life , Reading

“There comes a point when the confused or abused person hears a voice saying in his head, Oh well, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and, depending on the particular situation in which he finds him he either spends his last bit of money on a lottery ticket, or places on the gaming table the watch he inherited from his father and silver cigarette case that was a gift from his mother, or bets everything he has on red even though he knows that red has come up five times in a row”

José Saramago book The Cave

Source: The Cave (2000), p. 14 (Vintage 2003)

Money , Game , Time , Dependency

“If Van Eyck’s patrons had all been Buddhists he would neither have painted the Adoration of the Lamb nor, for that matter, the Hunting of the Otter, but though the fact that he did is therefore trivially connected with the civilization in which he worked, there is no need to place these works on the periphery of the Hegelian wheel and look for the governing cause that explains both otter hunting and piety in the particular form they took in the early decades of the fifteenth century, and which is also expressed in Van Eyck’s new technique.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

Painting

“Since property here exists in the form of stock, its movement and transfer become purely a result of gambling on the stock exchange, where the little fish are swallowed by the sharks and the lambs by the stock exchange wolves.”

Karl Marx book Das Kapital

Vol. III, Ch. XXVII, The Role of Credit, p. 440.
Das Kapital (Buch III) (1894)

Fish

“God’s heart has a special place for the poor, so much so that he himself “became poor” (2 Cor 8:9). The entire history of our redemption is marked by the presence of the poor. Salvation came to us from the “yes” uttered by a lowly maiden from a small town on the fringes of a great empire. The Saviour was born in a manger, in the midst of animals, like children of poor families; he was presented at the Temple along with two turtledoves, the offering made by those who could not afford a lamb (cf. Lk 2:24; Lev 5:7); he was raised in a home of ordinary workers and worked with his own hands to earn his bread. When he began to preach the Kingdom, crowds of the dispossessed followed him, illustrating his words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor” (Lk 4:18). He assured those burdened by sorrow and crushed by poverty that God has a special place for them in his heart: “Blessed are you poor, yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20); he made himself one of them: “I was hungry and you gave me food to eat”, and he taught them that mercy towards all of these is the key to heaven”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

cf. Mt 25:5ff.
Section 197
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

God , Children , Family , Food

“We see the most striking example of humility in the lamb which will submit to any animal; and when they are given for food to imprisoned lions they are as gentle to them as to their own mother, so that very often it has been seen that the lions forbear to kill them.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

Food , Animals

“The lion laying with the lamb is the idea that is either projected back in time, saying that there was a time, or maybe that there will be a time when the horrors of life are no longer necessary for life itself to exist. And the horrors of life are of course that everything eats everything else, and that everything dies, and that everything is born, and that the whole place is a charnal house. It's a catastrophe from beginning to end. This is the vision of it being other than that. There's a strong idea that human beings can interact with reality in such a way so that the tragic and evil elements of it can be mitigated, so that we can move closer to a state of being where we have the benefits of existence without the catastrophe that seems to go along with it.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Life , Way , Idea , Reality

“The fox barks not, when he would steal the lamb.”

William Shakespeare Henry VI (play) Part 1-3

Suffolk, Act III, scene i.
Henry VI, Part 2 (1592)

“Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.”

Evelyn Waugh book Vile Bodies

Source: Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 1

God

“Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

Fight

“I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

“The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Lie , Learning

“The lamb misused breeds public strife
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Forgiveness

“But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.”

Thomas Harris The Silence of the Lambs

Source: The Silence of the Lambs

Sleep , Silence

“I poke around in the pile, about to settle on some cod chowder, when Peeta holds out a can to me. “Here.”
I take it, not knowing what to expect. The label reads LAMB STEW.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Reading

“Mary had a little lamb, its fleece electrostatic / And everywhere Mary went, the lights became erratic.”

David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Light

“When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Source: Blood Meridian (1985), Chapter V
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

Mountain , Wolf , Cry

“Go to sleep, baby, Mama will sing. Of blue butterflies, and dragonfly wings. Moonlight and sunbeams, raiment so fine. Silver and gold, for baby of mine. Go to sleep, baby. Sister will tell, of wolves and of lambs, and demons who fell.”

Kim Harrison (1966) Pseudonym

Source: Black Magic Sanction

Sister , Sleep , Singing , Baby

“When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience

St. 5
1790s, The Tyger (1794)
Source: Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Smile , Star , Tear

“A lamb in a city of wolves.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

“Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

Lie , Art

“I've always liked, someday the lamb will lay by the lion…. but it won't get much sleep.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Sleep

“Some would say the Creator is a lamb. Some would say he's a lion. Some would say both. The fact is, he is neither a lamb nor a lion. These are fiction. Metaphors. Yet the Creator is both a lamb and a lion. These are both truths.”

Ted Dekker (1962) American writer

Source: Black: The Birth of Evil

Truth

“And like lambs to a slaughter we shall follow…”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

“We approach the house and I wave at Jimmy.
"And if he thinks he's eating with us, he's got another thing coming," my dad says.
Jimmy approaches us and takes the shopping bags from me, looking inside them.
"Lamb roast. Am I invited?”

Melina Marchetta (1965) Australian teen writer

Source: Saving Francesca

Thinking , Housing

“There is no greater love than the love the wolf feels for the lamb-it-doesn’t-eat.”

Hélène Cixous (1937) French philosopher and writer

Source: Stigmata: Escaping Texts

Love , Feeling , Wolf

“Which is worse? the wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Wolf

“A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

Herman Melville (1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet

Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 1851); published in Memories of Hawthorne (1897) by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, p. 157
Context: In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous — catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the Gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopelessness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination. I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling.

Books , Feeling , Sense

“Well, you certainly are the most wonderfully woolly baa-lamb that ever stepped.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Code of the Woosters

Source: The Code of the Woosters

“Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly bright.”

William Blake The Lamb

The Lamb, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Life , Clothes

“When the ceremony was over, I found The Bear and handed him my diploma along with a ballpoint pen. "What's this for, lamb?" "I want you to sign it, Colonel. I want you to make it official," I answered. "I wan the name of a man I can respect on my diploma, Colonel." He handed me back the diploma without signing it. "There already is, Bubba," he answered. "There already is."”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

And he pointed to my name.
Source: The Lords of Discipline (1980), p. 498

“Jeeves," I said, and I am free to admit that in my emotion I bleated like a lamb drawing itself to the attention of the parent sheep, "what the dickens is all this?”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Parent , Drawing

“Most Christians desire nonviolence, yes; but they are not talking about a nonviolent struggle for justice. They mean simply the absence of conflict. … The church says to the lion and the lamb, "Here, let me negotiate a truce," to which the lion replies, "Fine, after I finish my lunch."”

Walter Wink (1935–2012) American biblical scholar

Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (2003), p. 4

Justice

“The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Abraham Hayward, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1848.
Attributed

Water

“All you have to do is anesthetize the masses by telling them they’re an elite, that they’ve got a mission, that they’re making history, that they’re fulfilling their destiny and fighting for a better world — and they swallow it like lambs — even when a guttersnipe says it.”

Hans Hellmut Kirst book The Night of the Generals

The Night of the Generals (1962)

World , History , Fight

“"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb…" he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word.
"What a stupid lamb," I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Edward Cullen and Bella Swan, p. 274
Twilight series, Twilight (2005)

Love , Stupidity

“Hinduism always used violence as creed. For Hinduism, for Hindu dharma, resolving of a conflict is only by killing. There is no other discourse. Debate is not there. You have to kill the enemy. Whereas Buddha believed in discourse and resolving the conflict. So in a system where you have the two streams of thought, debate and discourse, human rights and anti-human rights, even the left has to take that historical tradition and examine its potential and use it for its propaganda systems. It is in this context that I have been saying that there is no use if you simply borrow concepts from the West. Christianity has a different ethic; it was an ethic of sacrifice. Christ's crucifixion is a symbol of sacrifice, it is not a killing symbol. The lamb is a productive symbol.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

"The State of Dalit Mobilization : An Interview with Kancha Ilaiah" in Ghadar Vol. 1, No. 3 (26 November 1997).

“God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb.”

Laurence Sterne book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Maria. Compare: "Dieu mésure le froid à la brebis tondue" (translated: "God measures the cold to the shorn lamb"), Henri Estienne (1594), Prémices, etc, p. 47; "To a close-shorn sheep God gives wind by measure", George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

God

“In his Gospel, St. John, through long and deep contemplation, acknowledges Jesus to be the Logos of God. In his epistles he points entirely away from himself toward Christ. Finally, in the Apocalypse, in the vision of the Lamb of God, Old and New Testaments are united, and the whole drama of salvation is summed up.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task https://books.google.it/books?id=yEjT5yVci2gC&pg=PT0, trans. John Saward, Ignatius Press, 1994.
Our Task: A Report and a Plan (1984)

God , Christ

“The lion and the lamb may, possibly, sumtime lay down in this world together for a fu minnits, but when the lion kums tew git up, the lamb will be missing.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Affurisms: Slips of the Pen http://books.google.com/books?id=Wpk_AAAAYAAJ&q="The+lion+and+the+lamb+may+possibly+sumtime+lay+down+in+this+world+together+for+a+fu+minnits+but+when+the+lion+kums+tew+git+up+the+lamb+will+be+missing"&pg=PA227#v=onepage The Complete Works of Josh Billings (1876)

World

“Whether men are pleased or not, we will, we must, worship the Lamb that was slain.”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

The Works of the Rev. John Newton http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=ejYIv91QlGUC&pg=PA382&lpg=PA382&dq=newton+we+must+worship+the+lamb&source=bl&ots=zNMOTpAZ3y&sig=llNL3C_qLM50GDCA9RkmkZDWuYs&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=__KXUsexDZXeoAScnoLgBg&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=newton%20we%20must%20worship%20the%20lamb&f=false, Vol. 2, p. 382.

Men

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Widely attributed to Franklin on the Internet, sometimes without the second sentence. It is not found in any of his known writings, and the word "lunch" is not known to have appeared anywhere in English literature until the 1820s, decades after his death. The phrasing itself has a very modern tone and the second sentence especially might not even be as old as the internet. Some of these observations are made in response to a query at Google Answers. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=389308
The earliest known similar statements are:
A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Gary Strand, Usenet group sci.environment, 23 April 1990. http://groups.google.com/group/sci.environment/msg/057b1c6389f4776f?dmode=source
Democracy is not freedom. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote.
Marvin Simkin, "Individual Rights", Los Angeles Times, 12 January 1992. http://articles.latimes.com/1992-01-12/local/me-358_1_jail-tax-individual-rights-san-diego
Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), ISBN 0312123337, p. 333.
Also cited as by Bovard in the Sacramento Bee (1994) http://www.giraffe.com/gr_wolves.html
Misattributed
Variant: Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

Democracy

“Just as I am — Thou wilt receive,
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come! I come!”

Charlotte Elliott (1789–1871) English poet, hymn writer, editor

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 231.

God

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Grass , Water , Past

“After all, animal rightists have not invented the vision of the wolf lying down with the lamb in Isaiah 11:6, or the universal command to be vegetarian in Genesis 1:29, or indeed the vision of the earth in a state of childbirth awaiting its deliverance from suffering in Romans 8: in these, and in other ways, animal rightists can claim to be rediscovering and reactualizing visionary elements already present within the Western religious tradition.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), pp. 54-55

Way , Lying , Suffering , Universe

“Christ is the great Burden bearer — the Lamb of God who beareth the sin of the world; but in order to enjoy the benefit of His interposition, I must distinctly and for myself take advantage of it. Conscious of my lost estate, I must seek a personal share in the common salvation.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 86.

God , World , Christ , Personality

“Beloved, I congratulate you, that you are at the feast of redeeming love, that you know the riches of grace in Christ Jesus; but this is only the "early meal" (introductory feast); the " grand supper "is awaiting you, at the close of the day, in the palace of the King, where the fellowship will be perfect and eternal, where the table will be beyond all the mists and fogs of sin, where death never enters to disturb the festivities, and where we shall see the Lamb face to face. O! if the feast with Jesus here is so precious, what, what must heaven be!”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 372.

Love , Death , Christ , Perfection

“He has now a second far greater success to gain: to seek out his real superiors, whom not the Tailor but the Almighty God has made superior to him, and see a little what he will do with these! Rebel against these also? Pass by with minatory eagle-glance, with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff, when these present themselves? The lion-hearted will never dream of such a thing. Forever far be it from him! His minatory eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove: his lion- heart will become a lamb's; all is just indignation changed into just reverence, dissolved in blessed floods of noble humble love, how much heavenlier than any pride, nay, if you will, how much prouder!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Love , God , Dreams , Change

“Don't try to cut any deals with me, Hector.
Do lions make peace treaties with men?
Do wolves and lambs agree to get along?”

Stanley Lombardo (1943) Philosopher, Classicist

Book XXII, lines 287–289; spoken by Achilles.
Translations, Iliad (1997)

Men , Peace

“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

“There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind.”

Homér Iliad

XXII. 262–263 (tr. Samuel Butler); Achilles to Hector.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

Men

“Even so a shepherd, seeking safety for his flock, lures the wolves at night by the bleating of a tethered lamb into the pitfall masked by a slender covering of leafage.”
Haud secus ac stabulis procurans otia pastor in foveam parco tectam velamine frondis ducit nocte lupos positae balatibus agnae.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book VI, lines 329–331
Punica

Night

“I'd remind you that in these experiments so far, about one quarter of the lambs that were born alive died within a few days because they hadn't completed normal development. Now, what may be being suggested here is that copies of children would be being produced, and some of those would die soon after birth. So I think that for a clinician to be suggesting doing that is a quite appalling and sad thing for him to be suggesting.”

Ian Wilmut (1944) embryologist

On proposals for human cloning in an Interview on The NewsHour, PBS (8 January 1998) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june98/cloning_1-8.html.

Children , Sadness , Birth , Thinking

“Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source,
The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sleep

“And man … no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto VIII
Queen Mab (1813)

“My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster to Victor Frankenstein in Ch. 17
Frankenstein (1818)

Peace , Food , Feeling , Nature

“To my mind the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body. I hold that, the more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Part III, Chapter 18, A Month with Gokhale II
1920s, An Autobiography (1927)

Life

“Goe to bed with the Lambe, and rise with the Larke.”

John Lyly (1554–1606) English politician

Source: Euphues and his England, P. 229. Compare: "To rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb", Breton, Court and Country, 1618 (reprint, page 182); "Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed", James Hurdis, The Village Curate.

“O Thou Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, what Thou bearest in Thy blessed hands and feet I cannot bear; take it all away. Hide me in the depths of Thy suffering love, mold me to the image of Thy divine passion.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 86.

Love , God , World , Suffering

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Smile , Sport , Winter

“I am going like a lamb to the slaughter; but I am calm as a summer's morning; I have a conscience void of offense toward God, and toward all men. I SHALL DIE INNOCENT, AND IT SHALL YET BE SAID OF ME — HE WAS MURDERED IN COLD BLOOD.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805–1844) American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement

1840s

Men , God , Summer

“The Maunder minimum corresponds almost precisely with the coldest excursion of the 'little ice age', a period of unusual cold in Europe from the 16th century through the early 19th century. In the coldest extremes of that period the average temperature was about one degree Celsius colder than it is now, according to the British climatologist Hubert H. Lamb. In that period the Alpine glaciers advanced farther than they had since the last major glaciation 15,000 years ago. In that period too the Norse colony in southwestern Greenland perished to a man, cut off from the rest of the world by pack ice that year after year failed to thaw.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Age , World

“All is the Self or Brahman. The saint, the sinner, the lamb, the tiger, even the murderer, as far as they have any reality, can be nothing else, because there is nothing else.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Reality

“And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me my Arrows of desire,
Bring me my Spear — O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant land.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Prefatory Poem
1800s, Milton (c. 1809)

God , Mountain , Sleep , Time

“"Lambe them, lads! lambe them!" a cant phrase of the time derived from the fate of Dr. Lambe, an astrologer and quack, who was knocked on the head by the rabble in Charles the First's time.”

Walter Scott book Peveril of the Peak

Peveril of the Peak, Chap. xlii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Fate , Time

“When my neighbor A—broke in business, and twenty-four hours made him a bankrupt, he came home, saying to himself, "Well, my money is gone, but Jesus is left." He did not merely come down to "hardpan," he came to something far more solid — to the everlasting arms. When another friend laid her beautiful boy in his coffin, after the scarlet fever had done its worst, she laid her own sorrowful heart upon the everlasting arms. The dear little sleeper was there already. The Shepherd had His lamb.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 594.

Money , Beauty , Home , Boy

“When to the cross I turn my eyes,
And rest on Calvary,
O Lamb of God, my sacrifice,
I must remember Thee.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 173.
Other

God

“Courteous reader, 'tis said of scripture that it is deep enough for an elephant to swim in, and yet shallow enough for a lamb to wade through.”

Ralph Venning (1621–1673) English minister

From the late 1640s, in Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (2002), p. 101.

“God wanted a blood sacrifice. God had shed innocent blood to cover the sin of Adam and Eve. Cain knew God wanted a bloody animal sacrifice, a lamb to be precise. Cain thought that he could get favor with God by bringing the work of his own hands.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

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

God , Animals

“Friedan: I thought it was absolutely outrageous that the Silence of the Lambs won four Oscars. […] I'm not saying that the movie shouldn't have been shows. I'm not denying the movie was an artistic triumph, but it was about the evisceration, the skinning alive of women. That is what I find offensive. Not the Playboy centerfold.”

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) American activist

The Playboy Interview (1992)

Women , Silence

“It began with one pig at a British slaughterhouse. Somewhere along the production line it was observed that the animal had blisters in his mouth and was salivating. The worst suspicions were confirmed, and within days borders had been sealed and a course of action determined. Soon all of England and the world watched as hundreds, and then hundreds of thousands, of pigs, cows, and sheep and their newborn lambs were taken outdoors, shot, thrown into burning pyres, and bulldozed into muddy graves. Reports described terrified cattle being chased by sharpshooters, clambering over one another to escape. Some were still stirring and blinking a day after being shot.”

Matthew Scully (1959) American political writer and speechwriter

Dominion (2002)

World , Animals

“Formerly a lamb was offered, a calf was offered. Christ is offered today…and he offers himself as priest in order that he may remit our sins: here in image, there in truth where, as our advocate, he intercedes for us before the Father.”
Ante agnus offerebatur, offerebatur et vitulus, nunc Christus offertur...et offert se ipse quasi sacerdos, ut peccata nostra dimittat. Hic in imagine, ibi in veritate, ubi apud Patrem pro nobis quasi advocatus intervenit.

Ambrose (339–397) bishop of Milan; one of the four original doctors of the Church

De officiis ministrorum ("On the Offices of Ministers" or, "On the Duties of the Clergy"), Book I, ch. 48. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZIwXAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA114&dq=%22ante+agnus+offerebatur%22&hl=en&ei=pTDSTcflDsrZ0QHjxKHYCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAzgy#v=onepage&q=%22ante%20agnus%20offerebatur%22&f=false
In, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, Edward J. Kilmartin, SJ, Robert J. Daly, SJ, Editor, 1998, The Liturgical Press, ISBN 0814662048 ISBN 9780814662045, p. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=WI2gC7lFmC4C&pg=PA19&lpg=PA19&dq=%22Christ+is+offered+today%22&source=bl&ots=MoKJXo6d2u&sig=8k0xytaJpidX3wg5RpQQKHwDxzw&hl=en&ei=hi_STbuzOYq_0AHwxKXKCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Christ%20is%20offered%20today%22&f=false
Alternate translation: In old times a lamb, a Calf was offered; now Christ is offered. But He is offered as man and as enduring suffering. And He offers Himself as a priest to take away our sins, here in an image, there in truth, where with the Father He intercedes for us as our Advocate. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/34011.htm

Truth , Christ