Quotes about tub (42 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Chuang Tzu's wife died and Hui Tzu came to console him, but Chuang Tzu was sitting, legs akimbo, bashing a battered tub and singing. Hui Tzu said, 'You lived as man and wife, she reared your children. At her death surely the least you should be doing is to be on the verge of weeping, rather than banging the tub and singing: this is not right!' Chuang Tzu said, 'Certainly not. When she first died, I certainly mourned just like everyone else! However, I then thought back to her birth and to the very roots of her being, before she was born. Indeed, not just before she was born but before the time when her body was created. Not just before her body was created but before the origin of life's breath. Her life's breath wrought a transformation and she had a body. Her body wrought a transformation and she was born. Now there is yet another transformation and she is dead. She is like the four seasons in the way that spring, summer, autumn and winter follow each other. She is now at peace, lying in her chamber, but if I were to sob and cry it would certainly appear that I could not comprehend the ways of destiny. This is why I stopped.<nowiki/”

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

Ch. 18 (Martin Palmer/Elizabeth Breuily, Penguin Publishing 1996)

Life , Death , Children , Peace

“What noble thing have you produced by your pursuit of philosophy? Who of your most eminent men has been free from vain boasting? Diogenes, who made such a parade of his independence with his tub, was seized with a bowel complaint through eating a raw polypus, and so lost his life by gluttony. Aristippus, walking about in a purple robe, led a profligate life, in accordance with his professed opinions. Plato, a philosopher, was sold by Dionysius for his gormandizing propensities.”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Ante-Nicene Christian library: v. 3 p. 6
Address to the Greeks

Life , Men

“Seducing him in the tub smelling of vinegar was out of the question. There had to be some boundaries.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

Question

“A vet! I started laughing weakly and had to sit on the edge of the tub. A vet. Wait till they found out how appropriate that was.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

Waiting

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

Reading

“I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Love , Water , Sea

“You can work out in a pool and sweat, but you don't smell. In the water you are weightless. You are ageless. It feels exhilarating to get wet. And you know the water is a very sexy medium. Why do you think people always get in a hot tub?”

Esther Williams (1921–2013) competitive American swimmer and actor

People , Feeling , Thinking , Water

“If anyone did that, I absolutely apologize. … Because everything we do is based at adults. We're asking adults be responsible. You were telling me about giving your children meat and milk. They're going to be to grow up to be tubs of lard. They're getting heart attacks.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

Interview on CNN's Crossfire http://www.animalrights.net/archives/year/2002/000094.html (2002); in response to Tucker Carlson's description of a PETA member campaigning directly to his four-year-old son outside a circus.
2002

Children , Heart

“You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"Porcelain and Pink"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

History , Thinking

“There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

"Notes on the Way", Time and Tide Magazine (10 June 1934); reprinted in The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings (1998)

War , Hope , Change

“Think of the firm as a gigantic tub of whole milk. The farmer can sell the whole milk as it is. Or he can separate out the cream, and sell it at a considerably higher price than the whole milk would bring. (Selling cream is the analog of a firm selling debt securities, which pay a contractual return.) But, of course, what the farmer would have left would be skim milk, with low butter-fat content, and that would sell for much less than whole milk. (Skim milk corresponds to the levered equity.) The Modigliani-Miller proposition says that if there were no cost of separation (and, of course, no government dairy support program), the cream plus the skim milk would bring the same price as the whole milk.”

Merton Miller (1923–2000) American economist

Merton Miller. Financial Innovations and Market Volatility, 1991. p. 269; as cited in [Merton H. Miller (1923–2000), http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Miller.html, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, 2nd, Library of Economics and Liberty, Liberty Fund, 2008]

Support , Thinking

“(Sylvia) I'm staying in this tub until the Soviets pull out of Afghanistan.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 38

“When you’ve parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you’ve had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?”

Mario Cuomo (1932–2015) American politician, Governor of New York

Commencement address at Syracuse University, quoted in New York Times (12 May 1986)

Love , Dreams , Cars , Question

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Philip Roth book Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

War , People , Mountain , Star

“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 12

Secret , Flowers , Lying , Sleep

“Seamen have a custom, when they meet a whale, to fling him out an empty tub by way of amusement, to divert him from laying violent hands upon the ship.”

Jonathan Swift book A Tale of a Tub

Preface
A Tale of a Tub (1704)

Way

“In the kynicism of Diogenes of Sinope, the laughter about philosophy itself became philosophical. … In the pantomimes and wordplays of the philosopher from the tub, the Gay Science was born, which saw the earnestness of the false life recur in the false earnestness of philosophy.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 535

Life , Laughter , Science , Falseness

“Every tub must stand upon its bottom.”

Charles Macklin (1699–1797) Irish actor

The Man of the World (1781), Act i. Sc. 2. Compare: "Every fat must stand upon his bottom", John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, Part i.

“Darwin seems to lose out with the public primarily when his supporters force him into a mano-a-mano Thunderdome death match against the Almighty. Most people seem willing to accept Darwinism as long as they don't have to believe in nothing but Darwinism. Thus, the strident tub-thumping for absolute atheism by evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, whom the new issue of Discover Magazine rightly criticizes as "Darwin's Rottweiler," is self-defeating.”

Steve Sailer (1958) American journalist and movie critic

The Left Doesn’t Like Darwin Either https://archive.is/20130630132900/www.vdare.com/sailer/050807_darwin.htm, VDARE, August 7, 2005

Death , People , Support

“This theme of mismeasurement interacts with the designation of the one hundred years between 1870 and 1970 as the “special century.” Measurement errors are greatest in the early years, both in the scope of the standard of living and in the extent of price index bias. Clearly the welfare benefits to consumers in the categories of life entirely omitted from GDP were greatest long ago: the transition from the scrub board to the automatic washing machine was a more important contributor to consumer welfare than the shift from manual to electronic washing machine controls or from a twelve-pound tub to an eighteen pound tub. The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 13

Life , Error

““Time to get up,” he informed her. “Don’t you hear the Almighty bellowing in the living room?”
“What’s he saying?” Marsha murmured crossly.
“Nothing in particular. Repent or suffer eternal damnation. The usual tribal tub-thumping.””

Philip K. Dick book Eye in the Sky

Source: Eye in the Sky (1957), Chapter 8 (p. 103)

Suffering , Time

“It took me years to figure out that you don't fall into a tub of butter, you jump for it.”

Claudette Colbert (1903–1996) French-American actress

Unknown

“On life's list of fun things to do, [visiting my in-laws] comes in somewhere below sitting in a tub full of scissors.”

Jeff Foxworthy (1958) American stand-up comedian

Totally Committed (1998)

Life , Law

“Do not believe what I tell you here any more than if it were some tale of a tub.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fourth Book (1548, 1552), Chapter 38.

“I threw the kitchen sink at him but he went to the bathroom and got his tub.”

Andy Roddick (1982) US tennis player

After being being asked how he felt of his own play, Wimbledon Final 2004.
Source: Piers Newbery (2004) " Federer fights back to retain title http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/3865037.stm news.bbc.co.uk, July 4, 2004

“The big artist does not sit down monkey like & copy a coal scuttle or an ugly old woman like some Dutch painters have done nor a dungpile, but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature & steals her tools. He learns what she does with light the big tool & then colour then form and appropriates them to his own use. Then he's got a canoe of his own smaller than Nature's but big enough for every purpose except to paint the midday sun which is not beautiful at all. It is plenty strong enough though to make midday sunlight or the setting sun if you know how to handle it. With this canoe he can sail parallel to Nature's sailing. He will soon be sailing only where he wants to selecting nice little coves & shady shores or storms to his own liking, but if ever he thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better shaped boat he'll capsize or stick in the mud & nobody will buy his pictures or sail with him in his old tub.”

Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) American painter

Letter to Benjamin Eakins (1868-03-03).

Beauty , Fashion , Nature , Thinking

“Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and and spoken for the other. A visitor looked under black beams, through leaded casements (past apple boughs, past box, past chairs like bath-tubs on broomsticks) to a lawn ornamented with one of the statues of David Smith; in the months since the figure had been put in its place a shrike had deserted for it a neighboring thorn tree, and an archer had skinned her leg against its farthest spike. On the table in the President’s waiting-room there were copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little magazine—that had no name. One walked by a mahogany hat-rack, glanced at the coat of arms on an umbrella-stand, and brushed with one’s sleeve something that gave a ghostly tinkle—four or five black and orange ellipsoids, set on grey wires, trembled in the faint breeze of the air-conditioning unit: a mobile. A cloud passed over the sun, and there came trailing from the gymnasium, in maillots and blue jeans, a melancholy procession, four dancers helping to the infirmary a friend who had dislocated her shoulder in the final variation of The Eye of Anguish.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1: “The President, Mrs., and Derek Robbins”, p. 3; opening paragraph of novel

Smile , History , Idea , Tree

“If being hit on the head by a falling flower tub could be worth cash to the victim, what price a child’s life under civil law?”

Lindsey Davis book The Ides of April

The Ides of April

Life , Law , Flowers

“In some great boarding schools for the fair sex, it is customary, upon the introduction of a novice, for the scholars to receive her with much pretended solemnity, and decorate a throne in which she is to be installed, in order to hear a set speech, addressed to her by one of the young ladies in the name of the rest. The throne is wide enough for three persons to sit conveniently, and is made with two stools, having a tub nearly filled with water between them, and the whole is covered by a counterpane or blanket, ornamented with ribands and other trifling fineries, and drawn very tightly over the two stools, upon each of which a lady is seated to keep the blanket from giving way when the new scholar takes her place; and these are called her maids of honour. The speech consists of high-flown compliments calculated to flatter the vanity of the stranger; and as soon as it is concluded, the maids of honour rising suddenly together, the counterpane of course gives way, and poor miss is unexpectedly immerged in the water.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 396
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Initiation

School , Sex , Way , Water

“There is a Karmic Rule of Kink (KROK), and it goes something like this: "Dump the honest foot fetishist and you will marry the dishonest necrophiliac." Break up with a guy over his relatively tame fetish — and a foot fetish is about as tame as they get — and KROK will make sure your next boyfriend is some lying corpsefucker who tells you only what you want to hear. ("Honestly, honey, I only like live girls!") Only after you've married the corpsefucker and had a few kids — once extricating yourself from the marriage becomes a hugely complicated ordeal — will he ask you to lie in a tub of ice until you're good and cold. And when you're lying in that tub of ice — and odds are you will, because you won't want to put your poor kids through a divorce — you'll remember that sweet, harmless foot fetishist whose heart you broke back in college, the man you could have married.”

Dan Savage (1964) American sex advice columnist and gay rights campaigner

Mary's Uterus http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=118733, Savage Love column, The Stranger, 14 December 2006

Marriage , Lie , Guy , Girl

“Shocking, absolutely shocking – they [the German w:Fluxus artists] pissed in the tub, snag the German national anthem, covered the audience with paper, poured laundry detergent into the piano, attached microphones to fountain pens.... it was all very cynical and destructive; it was a signal for us and we (the German artists Lueg and Polke and Gerhard Richter himself] became [also] cynical and cocky.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

“He was the great prose satirist of the Elizabethan period and may rightly be considered as the forerunner of that much greater satirist whose Tale of a Tub was a brilliant attack upon all forms of religious controversy.”

Martin Marprelate (1588–1589)

Sir Adolphus William Ward and Alfred Rayney Waller (eds.) The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21), vol. 3, ch. 17, sect. 16. http://www.bartleby.com/213/1716.html
Criticism