Quotes about worm (245 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Death

“I started with an impulse of my heart, with that instinct of defense which even the least of the worms has, not with the instinct of personal self-preservation, but of defense of the race to which I belong. This is why I have always had the feeling that the whole race rests on our shoulders, the living, and those who died for the Fatherland, and our entire future, and that the race struggles and speaks through us, that the hostile flock, however huge, in relation to this historical entity, is only a handful of human detritus which we will disperse and defeat… The individual in the framework and in the service of his race, the race in the framework and in the service of God and of the laws of the divinity: those who will understand these things will win even though they are alone. Those who will not understand will be defeated.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

God , Hostility , Law , Feeling

“The chain of young life is broken,
The journey is ended, the hour has struck, it is time to leave,
Time to go where there is no future,
No past, no eternity, no years;
Where there are no expectations, no passions,
No bitter tears, no fame, no honour;
Where memory sleeps deeply
And the heart in its narrow coffin home
Does not feel the worm gnawing it.”

Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) Russian writer, poet and painter

"Death" (1830 or 1831)
Poems

Life , Feeling , Home , Tear

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

“All that glisters is not gold;
Often have you heard that told:
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold:
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.”

William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Source: The Merchant of Venice

Life

“Tell your master that if there were as many devils at Worms as tiles on its roofs, I would enter.”

Martin Luther Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott

Psalm. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (translated by Frederic H. Hedge), Reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). "On the 16th of April, 1521, Luther entered the imperial city [of Worms]... On his approach… the Elector's chancellor entreated him, in the name of his master, not to enter a town where his death was decided. The answer which Luther returned was simply this". Bunsen, Life of Luther

“So, in the end, have we learned anything from this look at why the world turned out the way it is, that's of any use to us in our future? Something, I think. That the key to why things change is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? And that, in the past, the people who made change happen, were the people who had that knowledge, whether they were craftsmen, or kings. Today, the people who make things change, the people who have that knowledge, are the scientists and the technologists, who are the true driving force of humanity. And before you say what about the Beethovens and the Michelangelos? Let me suggest something with which you may disagree violently: that at best, the products of human emotion, art, philosophy, politics, music, literature, are interpretations of the world, that tell you more about the guy who's talking, than about the world he's talking about. Second hand views of the world, made third hand by your interpretation of them. Things like that [art book] as opposed to this [transparency of some filaments]. Know what it is? It's a bunch of amino acids, the stuff that goes to build up a worm, or a geranium, or you. This stuff [art book] is easier to take, isn't it? Understandable. Got people in it. This, [transparency] scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion, ideology, and leaves only what is demonstrably true about the world. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology they have begun to know that they don't know so much. And that, if they are to have more say in what happens to their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge, that they know exists, and that they don't possess. And by helped towards that knowledge I don't mean give everybody a computer and say: help yourself. Where would you even start? No, I mean trying to find ways to translate the knowledge. To teach us to ask the right questions. See, we're on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don't have access to it, as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb and blind. And I don't think most people want that. So, what do we do about it? I don't know. But maybe a good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything. Because that ability is there, as long as it is explained clearly enough. And then go and ask for explanations. And if you're thinking, right now, what do I ask for? Ask yourself, if there is anything in your life that you want changed. That's where to start.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

Life , People , Books , World

“The parable of a man greedy of this world is the parable of the silk worm: the more it winds the thread round itself the farther it becomes from salvation, until it dies of grief.”

Muhammad al-Baqir (677–733) fifth of the Twelve Shia Imams

Muhammad Kulayni, Usūl al-Kāfī - Book of Faith and Infidelity, vol.3, p. 202 & vol.2, p. 316

World

“To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.”

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) Russian revolutionary, philosopher, and theorist of collectivist anarchism

"On the International Workingmen's Association and Karl Marx" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1872/karl-marx.htm (1872)

Life , Nature , Animals

“Do you not know that we are worms and born
To form the angelic butterfly that soars,
Without defenses, to confront His judgment?”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto X, lines 121–129 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio
Context: O Christians, arrogant, exhausted, wretched,
Whose intellects are sick and cannot see,
Who place your confidence in backward steps,
Do you not know that we are worms and born
To form the angelic butterfly that soars,
Without defenses, to confront His judgment?
Why does your mind presume to flight when you
Are still like the imperfect grub, the worm
Before it has attained its final form?

Angels

“No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth”

William Shakespeare Richard II

Variant: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills
Source: Richard II

“The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.”

Ken Follett book The Pillars of the Earth

Source: The Pillars of the Earth

Men

“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”

Thomas Harris book Hannibal

Source: Hannibal

“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

William Shakespeare As You Like It

Source: As You Like It

Love , Men , Time

“Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.”

Solomon Northup book Twelve Years a Slave

Source: Twelve Years a Slave

Life

“One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Original: (de) Wer sich aber zum Wurm macht, kann nachher nicht klagen, dass er mit Füßen getreten wird.
Source: Part two: Metaphysical Principles of Virtue page 98. note: Metaphysics of Morals (1797)

People

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Truth , Error , Universe

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

Funny , Bird

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Fish

“But strength alone though of the Muses born
Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,
And thorns of life; forgetting the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.”

John Keats Sleep and Poetry

"Sleep and Poetry", st. 11
Poems (1817)

Life , Angels , Tree , Forgetting

“How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada..”

Hugo Ball (1886–1927) German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists

1916, Dada Manifesto (1916)

“I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood. When I look for my diametric opposite, an immeasurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister, — it would blaspheme my divinity to think I am related to this sort of canaille. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror; a real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt — in my highest moments, … because at that point I do not have the strength to resist poison worms …”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

"Why I Am So Wise", 3, as translated in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (2005) edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, p. 77
Ecce Homo (1888)

Way , Thinking , Sister , Time

“I have twice gone fishing with rod and line just because other boys asked me to, but this sport was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook for bait, and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up, and even found courage enough to dissuade other boys from going.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)

Boy , Courage , Fish , Sport

“If a robin can sing like that for a worm surely I can work like a father for my good wife and my four fine children!”

Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) British evangelist

Page 8
The Complete Story: A New Biography on the Apostle of Faith By Julian Wilson http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e2RWZpOHfmoC|Wigglesworth:

Children , Singing

“Worm that I am, consumed by passion, cast as bait for selfishness, I must nonetheless love humanity. If I can do this, and insofar as I can do this, I can also love God.”

Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) German philosopher

Wurm, der ich bin, von Leidenschaften zerfressen, der Selbstsucht zum Köder hingeworfen, soll ich dennoch den Menschen lieben. Wenn ich dies kann, und sofern ich dies kann, kann ich auch Gott lieben.
Source: The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 82 http://books.google.com/books?id=rZ9RAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA82

Love , God , Passion , Selfishness

“One who increases flesh, increases worms; one who increases possessions, increases worry; one who increases wives, increases witchcraft; one who increases maidservants, increases promiscuity; one who increases man-servants, increases thievery; one who increases Torah, increases life; one who increases study, increases wisdom; one who increases counsel, increases understanding; one who increases charity, increases peace.”

Hillel the Elder (-112–9 BC) Mishnah rabbi

2:7
Pirkei Avot

Life , Wisdom , Peace , Understanding

“The dialectics of history have already hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them; by the tired radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the Nepmen, the upstarts, by all the worms that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the manured revolution. He knows how to meet them on their own ground, he speaks their language and he knows how to lead them. He has the deserved reputation of an old revolutionist, which makes him invaluable to them as a blinder on the eyes of the country. He has will and daring. He will not hesitate to utilize them and to move them against the Party. Right now he is organising himself around the sneaks of the party, the artful dodgers.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Statement of 1924 on Joseph Stalin's growing powerbase, in Stalin, An Appraisal Of The Man And His Influence (1966); also in Stalin's Russia 1924-53 by Michael Lynch, p. 18

Art , History , Country

“The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.”

William Shakespeare Henry VI (play) Part 1-3

Clifford, Act II, scene ii.
Henry VI, Part 3 (1592)

“While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man",
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Conqueror Worm

"The Conqueror Worm" (1843), st. 5.

Angels

“Through it all I learned the value of being humble to the dust, reduced to ashes. Everyone should experience that. Before you can recognize you're somebody, you have to know you're nobody. [-] The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Life , Angels , Learning

“Your favourite virtue … Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man … Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman … Weakness
Your chief characteristic … Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness … To fight
Your idea of misery … Submission
The vice you excuse most … Gullibility
The vice you detest most … Servility
Your aversion … Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation … Book-worming
Favourite poet … Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer … Diderot
Favourite hero … Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine … Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower … Daphne
Favourite colour … Red
Favourite name … Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish … Fish
Favourite maxim … Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me, Terence]
Favourite motto … De omnibus dubitandum”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Everything must be doubted
Marx's replies to a set of questions given to him by his daughters Jenny and Laura in 1865 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/04/01.htm

Books , Flowers , Idea , Fish

“Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Attributed in Instructions to Young Sportsmen (1824) by Colonel Peter Hawker

Fools , Fish , Flying

“If each us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound — then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Law , Nature , Bird , Sense

“When he was not busy doing math, he reads fat books covered with rough leather, on the pages of which can be seen very old, perfectly round holes dug out by medieval worms. Or else he passes through a museum while devoting himself to unbelievably profound notions about Van Gogh's paintings or Greek amphorae.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, p. 31 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31
Quote About

Books , Business , Reading , Painting

“It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

II.353
Human, All Too Human (1878)

“The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done — turn back and get at something profitable — no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Ch. 22 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-22.html
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

Cats , Learning , Time , Horse

“Having rationalized his economic system, that is, having saturated it with consciousness and planfulness, man will not leave a trace of the present stagnant and worm-eaten domestic life.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

Literature and Marxism (1924)

Life

“No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker (1939), quoted in A Life of Jung (2002) by Ronald Hayman, p. 360
Variant: No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps.
Context: No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honour, it has no word to keep. … Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation — because he is speaking with 78 million voices.

Fate

“The highest cloth is made from the excrement of worms, which is silk.”

Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111) Persian Muslim theologian, jurist, philosopher, and mystic

Clothes

“Razo hopped back up and adopted a posture that said he was completely unruffled, never had been, and in fact was ready to do something manly like lift boulders or swallow live worms.”

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

“Kneeling before him, Regin murmured, "Don't let that Fegley worm get to you." Still staring ahead, the kid slowed his banging. "There's a good… male of indeterminate species.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

“Why is it we have so little choice? We live like the lowliest worms. Always defeated - defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying. Sill, to cease living is unacceptable.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Kitchen

Source: Kitchen

Love , Sleep

“Oh my gods, when do you not sport wood? There are bathrooms in the back, so go burp the worm or whatever.--Regin”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

God , Sport

“The early bird may get the worm, but it's the second mouse who gets the cheese.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Bird , Funny

“I must say one thing about southern down-home brewed coffee with chicory. If you have worms, you'll never have them again.”

Clive Cussler (1931) Novelist

Source: The Sea Hunters

Home , Coffee

“The worms were beautifully drawn, with their nervous systems and reproductive organs shaded in different colors of highlighter, but the artist had also given them big goofy smiling faces. Grotesque but lovable in a cross-eyed way.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Smile , Color , Way

“Let every book-worm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart good, hasten to give it the widest circulation that newspapers and magazines, penny and halfpenny, can afford.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Books , Heart

“Forsooth, I no longer toil in vain,
To prove that demon pox warps the brain.
So though 'ti pity, it's not in vain
That the pox-ridden worm was slain:
For to believe in me, you all must deign.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“There is no greater fan of fly fishing then the worm.”

Patrick F. McManus (1933–2018) American journalist

Fish , Flying

“You cannot reduce the situation to worm jokes, Will. This is Gabriel and Gideon’s father we’re discussing.”
“We’re not just discussing him; we’re chasing him through an ornamental sculpture garden because he’s turned into a worm.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

“He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.”

Stephen King book The Stand

Source: The Stand

Smile , Thinking

“What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.”

Cormac McCarthy book Suttree

page 130
Source: Suttree (1979)
Context: Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.

God , Soul

“It costs me never a stab nor squirm

To tread by chance upon a worm.

"Aha, my little dear," I say,

"Your clan will pay me back some day."”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

First printed in New Yorker, (9 April 1927) p. 31
Sunset Gun (1927)

Chance

“The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails!”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff (Ch. XIV).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.

“Born
of Black
and White, Eaten
with worms,
I'm a Saint, a Sinner,
a Siren of the
Word, The Circle
knows me, the rest
just wanna trip on
Grace Juice, Baby
Showdown
at midnight”

Ted Dekker book Showdown

Source: Showdown

Baby

“Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Source: Being and Nothingness

Heart

“Never regret trusting someone. It proves you have a heart. But if he turns out to be a lying worm… I'm not going to waste my time crying. Because I am way too fabulous for that.”

Jude Watson book Beyond the Grave

Source: Beyond the Grave

Way , Lying , Time , Heart

“O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:”

William Blake book Songs of Experience

The Sick Rose, plate 39.
Source: Songs of Experience (1794)
Context: p>O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.</p

Art , Night

“If your life truths have to be protected like some people keep their couches in plastic then ciao. have a nice life. if we bump into eachoter at Target, i'm the one buying the sour gummy worms and thats all you need to know about me.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Wild Roses

Life , People , Truth

“Sometimes you met someone that changed the pattern, who wormed their way past the cracks in your heart, caulked them up, sealed themselves in, and stayed there. Sometimes they did it by insisting you meet them at every step, as Jamie had done to me.”

Diana Peterfreund (1979) American writer

Source: Tap & Gown

Way , Change , Past , Heart

“We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glow-worm.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

As quoted by Violet Bonham-Carter in Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (1965), according to The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 155 ISBN 0300107986
Post-war years (1945–1955)
Source: Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill's Speeches

“He has become a worm. That is what I am telling you."
"I don't suppose it would be possible," said Henry into the silence, "to, er, step on him?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Silence

“Grow the lawn and mow the lawn
always keep the TV on,
brush your teeth and kill the germs,
poison apples, poison worms.”

Trenton Lee Stewart The Mysterious Benedict Society

Source: The Mysterious Benedict Society

“I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two —
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

World , Beauty , Waiting

“I don't even have moderately big breasticles. They just look like - well, nevermind what they look like. At least they stay strapped down when I worm into a sports bra.”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Betrayals

Sport

“The young curate, already pale to the lips, rolled his eyes up until only the whites showed, and began to pray in a trembling, feeble voice. Raised in an ecclesiastical society, where the tenets of the Faith are never argued, having long ago all been decided upon, he had never before been exposed to any difference of opinion on such holy matters. It was, indeed, for him an earth-shaking experience even to be listening to these hideous and pandemonial hallucinations, these nauseously original ideas, each of which gnawed at the roots of his sanity like a voracious worm, until the poor fellow felt his reason began to totter and the foundations of his faith began to shudder and reel.”

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 5 (pp. 61-62)

Faith , Idea

“True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,
Imagination! which from earth and sky,
And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills
The Universe with glorious beams, and kills
Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow
Of its reverberated lightning.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Epipsychidion

Epipsychidion (1821)

Love , Truth , Error , Imagination

“The face forgives the mirror, the worm forgives the plough, the question begs the answer, can you forgive me somehow?”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

"All the World is Green", Blood Money (2002).

Forgiveness , Question

“But some degree of intelligence appears, as we shall see in the next chapter, to be exhibited in this work,—a result which has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 35. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=50&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

Intelligence , Appearance

“I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Roosevelt to Henry M. Heymann (2 December 1919), as quoted in Roosevelt and Howe (1962), by Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., p. 153
1910s

Bad luck , Bird , Thinking

“It was so hot today I saw a robin dipping his worm in Nestea.
It was so hot today I saw a pigeon walking in the shadow of Orson Welles.
It was so hot today that Burger King was singing, "if you want it your way, cook it yourself."”

Johnny Carson (1925–2005) American talk show host and magician

The Tonight Show (Summer 1977).

Way , Singing , Cooking

“Alexander: I myself was educated in Italy. My doctorate in philosophy is from the University of Padua.
Renne: Really? Philosophy?
Alexander: My dissertation was on worms.
Renne: Worms the philosopher?
Alexander: No, just worms.
Renne: Ah, the philosophy of worms.
Alexander: Not at all. Worms have no philosophy, as far as is known.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

The Coast of Utopia: Voyage (2002)

Education , Universe

“b>Don't let me die in an automobile
I wanna lie in an open field
Want the snakes to suck my skin
Want the worms to be my friends
Want the birds to eat my eyes
As here I lie
The clouds fly by</b”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

"The End; <i>Live in New York</i>" (1970), "The End; Live at The Hollywood Bowl" (1968)

Lie , Bird , Flying

“And then as the other world produces serpents, and vipers, malignant, and venomous creatures, and worms, and caterpillars, that endeavour to devour that world produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of diverse parents, and kinds, so this world, ourselves produces all these in us, in producing diseases and sicknesses of all those sorts; venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases…”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

IV. Mediscque Vocatur; The physician is sent for.
Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

World , Disease , Parent

“You are the man newly arriving
at history’s worm-ravaged door,
the woman whose shadows are salves
upon the bleeding breasts of the earth,
the infant whose heartbeat
floods every harp in Paradise.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Self Knowledge in the New Millennium, p. 57).
Book Sources, I Made My Boy Out of Poetry (1998)

History

“I see the lost Love in beauty
Go gliding over the main:
I feel the ancient sweetness,
The worm and the wormwood again.”

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) English poet and critic

Past and Present

Love , Beauty , Feeling

“I say to myself that her small hands are no more worm, and that I would never again carry them soft to my front.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

“Ah! where shall weary man take sanctuary,
where live his little span of life secure?
and 'scape of Heaven serene th' indignant storms
that launch their thunders at us earthen worms?”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Onde pode acolher-se um fraco humano,
Onde terá segura a curta vida,
Que não se arme, e se indigne o Céu sereno
Contra um bicho da terra tão pequeno?
Stanza 106, lines 5–8 (tr. Richard Francis Burton)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Life

“a robin said to an
angleworm as he ate him
i am sorry but a bird
has to live somehow the
worm being slow witted could
not gather his
dissent into a wise crack
and retort he was
effectually swallowed
before he could turn
a phrase”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

the robin and the worm

Bird

“Darwin himself told us in his last book (The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms) that we should never underestimate the power of worms on the move…. The inversion of a humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that "the smallest worm will turn being trodden on." And Cervantes wrote in his author's preface to Don Quixote that "even a worm when trod upon, will turn again." …Geoffrey, it seems, was correct after all - not in every detail, of course, but at least in basic vision and theoretical meaning. And the triumph of surprise, the inversion of nuttiness to apparent truth, stands as a premier example of the most exciting general development in evolutionary theory during our times.”

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

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 329-330
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Truth , Books , Time

“If Evolution is true, how would you answer the question, ‘where did I come from?’ Well if Evolution is true, you came from a cosmic burp about twenty billion years ago. Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Well if Evolution is true, there is no purpose to life. So we might as well have fun. If it feels good, do it. Where am I going when I die? Well if Evolution is true, you’re just going to the grave and you’re going to get recycled into a worm or a plant. But the Bible says, ‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth.’ Now if that’s true, that puts a whole different set of answers to those questions.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Life , God , Feeling , Question

“O Nation, collect your compassion. Weep! For one of your shining lights is entombed in darkness. Weep! O ye officers and soldiers, whom he loved and led to military glory. Weep! O ye farmers and ye Poor, for your improver and benefactor has become a prey to worms. Come water his tomb with your tears.”

James Morris III (1752–1820) American writer

Memorial service for George Washington held in South Farms, Connecticut, 22 February 1880. As quoted in [Strong, Barbara Nolen, The Morris Academy: Pioneer in Coeducation, Morris Bicentennial Committee, 1976, Torrington, 31, http://books.google.com/books?id=nrCYGQAACAAJ&dq]

Love , Tear , Light , Water

“Death's dry bones glowed with light in the erotic dark
but he woke not nor felt the two warm bodies merge;
the male worm then took heart and in his wife's ear whispered:
"With one sweet kiss, dear wife, we've conquered conquering Death!"”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Orpheus' song, Book III, line 178
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Death , Kiss , Light , Heart

“When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Source: The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881), Chapter 1: Habits of Worms, p. 28. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=43&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image

Indifference

“Come fishing with me, said the fisherman to the worm.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Komm, geh mit angeln, sagte der Fischer zum Wurm.
Mutter Courage to the army recruiter when he tries to recruit her son in Scene 1
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939)

Fish

“Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)

Beauty , Thinking

“Sniviling [sic] worm (…) a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank.”

Mark Williams American conservative activist, radio talk show host and author

Attacking Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, for his support of the same mosque.
Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/25/2010-05-25_tea_party_drip_bags_on_stringer.html#ixzz0oxRMH0QV