Elephants quotes
387 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside elephants — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Elephants are living treasures. Nature's gardeners. Nature's great teachers. Tragically some people don't give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. The ivory. We must challenge this so-called 'trade' with all our might and shame on those who would condone it."
"Awake. Be the witness of your thoughts. The elephant hauls himself from the mud. In the same way drag yourself out of your sloth."
"Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage."
"You know...they say an elephant never forgets. What they don't tell you is, you never forget an elephant."
"Courage~ What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot?~Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz"
"The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents--or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall."
"If he be so resolved, I can o'ersway him; for he loves to hear That unicorns may be betrayed with trees And bears with glasses, elephants with holes, Lions with toils, and men with flatterers"
"I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor."
"Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget."
"Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God."
"I went to University in 1991, and I remember, nobody thought of India. I remember conversations where people would laugh and say, "Do you have elephants on the road?" Nobody is saying that today."
"And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is."
"May the bird of paradise fly up your nose, may an elephant caress you with his toes, may your wife be plagued with runners in her hose."
"Employers ganging up against workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants."
"There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off."
"I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa Seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror... As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight."
"As an elephant in the battlefield withstands arrows shot from bows all around, even so shall I endure abuse."
"Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing."
"It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss."
"How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world."
