Quotes about snake (231 quotes, page 3)

“Amir Khusrau mentions some of the powers “of sorcery and enchantment possessed by the inhabitants of India. First of all they can bring a dead man to life. If a man has been bitten by a snake and is rendered speechless, they can resuscitate him even after six months.””

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

Amir Khusrau, Nuh Sipehr, Elliot and Dowson, III, p.563. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 1
Nuh Siphir

Life , Dead

“Certainty sent a sick dread snaking through his gut: he was being stalked.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Bone House (2011), p. 304

“Ruling Yemen is hard. I always say it’s like dancing on the heads of snakes”

Ali Abdullah Saleh (1947–2017) President of North Yemen from 1978 to 1990; President of Yemen from 1990 to 2011

The Man Who Danced on the Heads of Snakes Dec 2017) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/07/opinion/sunday/yemen-saleh-death-legacy.html

Dance

“She said, "Love isn't enough. Your parents have to know how to relate to you, and to each other. They have to want to be with you more than with anyone else. They have to love being home more than anywhere in the world, and they have to be more interested in you than in…"
"Snakes and tornadoes," I suggested.
"God, I love them. They're nice, Jimmy, they really are, and they mean well. But they live inside themselves more than not, and they keep their doors closed. You see them mostly through windows."”

Dean Koontz book Life Expectancy

Source: Life Expectancy (2004), Chapter 36; conversation between Lorrie Lynn Hicks and Jimmy Tock

Love , God , World , Home

“And the snake who'd held the world, a stick, a carrot and string
Was crushed beneath the foot of Your not wanting anything.”

Aaron Weiss

A Stick, a Carrot and String.
It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright (2009)

World

“(After asking the audience about their negative experiences with Marijuana)
BB: So, what form did these experiences take?
Audience Member: Swimming with dolphins! (mentioned earlier on the show)
BB: (misunderstands) Dolby? What, you hear everything with a slightly reduced hiss? (As Audience Member) I like to hear the world in Dolby, it's fantastic! Mind you, it means that no snake will I ever hear. And I said that in a very strange way. [As Yoda] No snake will I ever hear, mmm! [Normally] Never put Dolby on snake detectors, that's what we must remember.”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Part Troll (2004)

World , Way , Marijuana

“The Devil is a Five-headed
Snake, says the father.
The son says, Nay, it's a Six-headed one.”

Subramanya Bharathi (1882–1921) Tamil poet

"When I Think Of My People Broken Down", as translated in "The Poetry of Sri Lanka" Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall-Winter 1976), published by Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, p. 11 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40872078
Context: The Devil is a Five-headed
Snake, says the father.
The son says, Nay, it's a Six-headed one.And then their hearts burn
with hate for each others —
and they live apart for many years.

“Who questions with a snake if the snake sting?
Who reasons of the lightning if it burn?
While these things are, deadly will these things be;
And so the curse that comes of cursed faith.”

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

John Knox as portrayed in Bothwell : A Tragedy (1874) Act I, Sc. 2.
Bothwell : A Tragedy (1874)
Context: Sins are sin-begotten, and their seed
Bred of itself and singly procreative;
Nor is God served with setting this to this
For evil evidence of several shame,
That one may say, Lo now! so many are they;
But if one, seeing with God-illumined eyes
In his full face the encountering face of sin,
Smite once the one high-fronted head, and slay,
His will we call good service. For myself,
If ye will make a counsellor of me,
I bid you set your hearts against one thing
To burn it up, and keep your hearts on fire,
Not seeking here a sign and there a sign,
Nor curious of all casual sufferances,
But steadfast to the undoing of that thing done
Whereof ye know the being, however it be,
And all the doing abominable of God.
Who questions with a snake if the snake sting?
Who reasons of the lightning if it burn?
While these things are, deadly will these things be;
And so the curse that comes of cursed faith.

Faith , Question

“More and more centres of population are joining the socialist competition to acquire the name of the place where prince Oleg was stung by a snake and former czarina Maria was strangled.”

Aleksandr Zinovyev (1922–2006) Russian writer

Katastroika (1988)

“Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Darwiniana: the Origin of Species (1860) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8thdr10.txt
1860s
Context: It is true that if philosophers have suffered their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science...

Lie , Science

“One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.”

August Kekulé (1829–1896) German organic chemist

Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54
Context: I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.

“To me, no blazon on a foeman's shield
Shall e'er present a fear! such pointed threats
Are powerless to wound; his plumes and bells,
Without a spear, are snakes without a sting.”

Aeschylus (-525–-456 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Source: Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), lines 397–399 (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

Fear

“Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"An Unexpected Meeting"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: Our snakes have shed their lightning,
our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago. We fall silent in mid-sentence,
all smiles, past help.
Our humans
don't know how to talk to one another.

“Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

"A Sort of a Song"
The Wedge (1944)
Context: Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
— through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Waiting

“My general expression is that all human beings who can do anything; and dogs that track unseen quarry, and homing pigeons, and bird-charming snakes, and caterpillars who transform into butterflies, are magicians.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Ch. 27 http://www.resologist.net/talent27.htm
Wild Talents (1932)
Context: My general expression is that all human beings who can do anything; and dogs that track unseen quarry, and homing pigeons, and bird-charming snakes, and caterpillars who transform into butterflies, are magicians. … Considering modern data, it is likely that many of the fakirs of the past, who are now known as saints, did, or to some degree did, perform the miracles that have been attributed to them. Miracles, or stunts, that were in accord with the dominant power of the period were fostered, and miracles that conflicted with, or that did not contribute to, the glory of the Church, were discouraged, or were savagely suppressed. There could be no development of mechanical, chemical, or electric miracles —
And that, in the succeeding age of Materialism — or call it the Industrial Era — there is the same state of subservience to a dominant, so that young men are trained to the glory of the job, and dream and invent in fields that are likely to interest stockholders, and are schooled into thinking that all magics, except their own industrial magics, are fakes, superstitions, or newspaper yarns.

Dogs , Home , Bird

“Now she took the sword back into her hand and knelt on the rim of the invisible blackness below. She had gone this path once before and once only, and never thought to find any necessity in life strong enough to drive her down again. The way was the strangest she had ever known. There was, she thought, no such passage in all the world save here. It had not been built for human feet to travel. It had not been built for feet at all. It was a narrow, polished shaft that cork-screwed round and round. A snake might have slipped in it and gone shooting down, round and round in dizzy circles—but no snake on earth was big enough to fill that shaft. No human travelers had worn the sides of the spiral so smooth, and she did not care to speculate on what creatures had polished it so, through what ages of passage.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

Black God's Kiss (1934); pp. 9-10
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)

Strong , Way , Age , World

“I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”

August Kekulé (1829–1896) German organic chemist

Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54

Time , Night , Understanding , Dreams

“Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”

Toni Morrison book Beloved

Beloved (1987)

Sleep , Question , Water , Way

“I’m still wearing my shoes, I realize. And I’m still wearing this fucking suit. I didn’t even take it off for the flight—I must be turning into a manager or something. I have a sudden urge to wash compulsively. At least the tie’s snaked off to wherever the horrid things live when they’re not throttling their victims.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 5, “High Society” (pp. 100-101)

Shoe

“The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Preface"
Why I Am a Vegetarian: An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society (1895)

Age

“Everyone looks on me like a black snake.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Babington Letter (1870)

“Once, when the bar was slow, he told her about things he’d found in his clients’ pools. Alligators, for example; he’d encountered at least a dozen. Also the occasional snake. Hundreds of frogs. These were to be expected in South Florida, which as far as the native wildlife was concerned was still a swamp, no matter how many houses got built on it.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Novels, Tricky Business (2002), Chapter 7

Housing

“TotalBiscuit: Now I will be eaten by a giant snake!”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

gets eaten by a giant snake
'Genna: No—What?! Okay, wait a minute—that's what you get for winning?!
TotalBiscuit: Yes, you are eaten by Nidhogg, the giant snake.
Genna: What kind of dumb game is this?!
TotalBiscuit: Well, it's the one where you are eaten by Nidhogg, the giant snake.
Other videos, WTF Research Stream for Nidhogg (feat. Genna Bain)

“Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here.
The Rattlesnake
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Country

“What if your enemy were your enemy because of poor communication and misunderstanding? What if your enemy were your enemy because of the instigative nature of the ego? What if your enemy were a necessary obstacle put in your life by fate to overcome in order to progress to the higher version of self? I wonder about that because what if your enemy is in fact your hero? Make sure the snake in your life isn't just your pride and ego.”

Scarlet Jei Saoirse (1984) American singer and actress

Fate , Communication , Nature , Self-confidence

“Sickened by vermin
that feed, in the shade of the good,
on envy, greed, and suspicion,
by the snake-like hissing
of venomous tongues
that fear hate and revile
the mystery of free thought
and upright heart
The spirit would cast aside all deceit,
open his heart to the spirit he trusts,
and unite with him freely as one.”

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

Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), The Friend

Fear , Hate , Heart , Envy

“The snake that can't peel off its skin can't grow. The soul is trapped inside the body; just like a tree inside a seed.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Soul , Tree

“A snake lurks in the grass.”

Virgil book Eclogues

(la) Latet anguis in herba.
Book III, line 93
Eclogues (37 BC)

Grass

“A small snake does not make nearby frogs, chickens and ducks feel threatened. But when it grows to be a python, even nearby pigs, oxen, horses and goats feel a threat to their survival.”

Feng Shih-kuan (1945) Taiwanese politician

Feng Shih-kuan (2017) cited in " Once formidable, Taiwan’s military now overshadowed by China’s https://www.todayonline.com/world/once-formidable-taiwans-military-now-overshadowed-chinas" on Today Online, 4 November 2017.

Horse , Feeling

“The difference between a Hero and an ordinary man is that when the ordinary man comes upon a flaming death swamp full of venomous dragon snakes, he turns around and goes home. The Hero strips down and goes for a swim.”

Jim C. Hines (1974) American writer

Source: The Goblin Quest Series, Goblin Hero (2007), Chapter 4 (p. 60)

Home , Death

“As 'persons living in a house infested with venomous snakes are always alert, so should men diving in the world be always vigilant against the allurement of lust and greed.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

83
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960)

Housing , Personality , World , Men

Quotes about snake page 3

Quotes about snake
page 3