Quotes about paddle (28 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Be a duck, remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.”

Michael Caine (1933) English actor and author

Hell

“When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles
and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles…
… they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle
bottle paddle battle.”

Dr. Seuss book Fox in Socks

Source: Fox in Socks

Fight

“We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since days of long ago.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Sun , Sea

“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. What little I know I learned at home. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in Denis Rouart (1972) Claude Monet, p. 21 : About his youth
after Monet's death

Life , Books , School , Home

“Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 4
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Lovers , Heart

“When the game ended, Mike laid down his control paddle. "So you've met the Nordic goddess, right?"

Aria glanced up at him warily. "Excuse me?"

Mike rolled his eyes. "Klaudia, which I'm pretty sure is Scandinavian for.”

Sara Shepard (1973) Author

Source: Twisted

Game

“Don't show it and don't panic. Do like the ducks; on the surface stay calm, and below it paddle lile hell”

Dan Brown book The Lost Symbol

Source: The Lost Symbol

Hell

“William untucked the covers and stood, making a mental list of everything he'd need for the coming trip. A few blades, serrated and non serrated. A vial of acid. A bone saw. A spiked paddle. A cat-o'-nine-tails. And a bag of Gummy Bears.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Secret

Cats

“And he paddled away in his douche canoe.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: NOS4A2

“But in the judgments they exercise they are most accurate and just, nor do they pass sentence by the votes of a court that is fewer than a hundred. And as to what is once determined by that number, it is unalterable. What they most of all honor, after God himself, is the name of their legislator [Moses], whom if any one blaspheme he is punished capitally. They also think it a good thing to obey their elders, and the major part. Accordingly, if ten of them be sitting together, no one of them will speak while the other nine are against it. They also avoid spitting in the midst of them, or on the right side. Moreover, they are stricter than any other of the Jews in resting from their labors on the seventh day; for they not only get their food ready the day before, that they may not be obliged to kindle a fire on that day, but they will not remove any vessel out of its place, nor go to stool thereon. Nay, on other days they dig a small pit, a foot deep, with a paddle (which kind of hatchet is given them when they are first admitted among them); and covering themselves round with their garment, that they may not affront the Divine rays of light, they ease themselves into that pit, after which they put the earth that was dug out again into the pit; and even this they do only in the more lonely places, which they choose out for this purpose; and although this easement of the body be natural, yet it is a rule with them to wash themselves after it, as if it were a defilement to them.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

God , Food , Exercises , Nature

“For nature beats in perfect tune,
And rounds with rhyme her every rune,
Whether she work in land or sea,
Or hide underground her alchemy.
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Woonotes II, st. 7
1840s, Poems (1847)

Beauty , Nature , Perfection , Sea

“Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

Source: The Faith of Leap (2011), p. 178

Thinking

“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 6, "Christian Marriage"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Life , Death , Women , Men

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Star , Fish

“Six days shalt thou paddle and pack, but on the seventh thou shall wash thy socks.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"Canada, 1924"; Published in Round River, Luna B. Leopold (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1966, p. 54.
1920s

“The sum of evolutionary evidence is thoroughly damning. In nearly every modification of the evolutionary process made in the duckbills as they developed from their dryosaur ancestors, the duckbills suffered a diminution of their swimming potential. Their fore- and hind paws became shorter and more compact, not longer and more widely spread. Their tails got weaker and stiffer. Far from being the best, the duckbills must have been the clumsiest and slowest swimmers in all the Dinosauria. If pressed, they probably could paddle slowly from one riverbanck to another. The central theme of their bodily evolution was indeed specialized - orthodox theory was right on that point - but the direction of specialization was landward. These dinosaurs were specialized for a totally terrestrial existence.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 154-155
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Suffering

“Darius was clearly of the opinion
That the air is also man’s dominion,
And that, with paddle or fin or pinion,
We soon or late
Shall navigate
The azure, as now we sail the sea.”

John Townsend Trowbridge (1827–1916) American author

Darius Green and his Flying-Machine.

Sea

“Paddling a canoe is a source of enrichment and inner renewal.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

As quoted in "Pierre Elliott Trudeau" profile in The Greatest Canadian at CBC http://web.archive.org/web/20041029152936/http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/top_ten/nominee/trudeau-pierre-know.html

“I am a fanatic for big waves. I just can’t resist them and the urge to paddle out and try to ride the biggest waves of all is the most compelling thing in my life, the most moving challenge I know.”

Bob Pike (surfer) (1940–1999) Australian surfer

“With Your Whole Heart Jumping”

Life

“I have gone to the set and you’re kind of around in this—it’s kind of combat writing when you do rewriting and stuff, and I feel like it’s a kind of ambulance chasing. Recently, I did this kind of a (laughing) where you go, “Oh, my God, it’s bleeding from the second act. Quick! Quick! Give me a suture! No, give me the paddles! This is the third act that’s having a heart attack!! The star is coming! The star is coming!"”

Carrie Fisher (1956–2016) American actress, screenwriter and novelist

And it's this incredibly intense process!
From the filmmaking documentary Dreams on Spec

God , Feeling , Star , Heart

“In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1997 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1997.html
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

World , Error , Thinking

“What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions? … Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle?—yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillæ. Analogous laws govern the construction of the mouths and limbs of crustaceans. So it is with the flowers of plants. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XIII: "Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs", pages 434-435 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=452&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

Law , Flowers , Bee , Animals

“In the morning when we began straggling out in small parties on our way to the trial, several of us went down in the elevator with three entirely correct old gentlemen looking much alike in their sleekness, pinkness, baldness, glossiness of grooming, such stereotypes as no proletarian novelist of the time would have dared to use as the example of a capitalist monster in his novel. We were pale and tightfaced; our eyelids were swollen; no doubt in spite of hot coffee and cold baths, we looked rumpled, unkempt, disreputable, discredited, vaguely guilty, pretty well frayed out by then. The gentlemen regarded us glossily, then turned to each other. As we descended the many floors in silence, one of them said to the others in a cream-cheese voice, "It is very pleasant to know we may expect things to settle down properly again," and the others nodded with wise, smug, complacent faces.
To this day, I can feel again my violent desire just to slap his whole slick face all over at once, hard, with the flat of my hand, or better, some kind of washing bat or any useful domestic appliance being applied where it would really make an impression — a butter paddle — something he would feel through that smug layer of too-well-fed fat.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)

Way , Feeling , Coffee , Silence