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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"As a toy fruit or a toy elephant reminds one of the real fruit and the living animal, so do the images that are worshipped remind one of the God who is formless and eternal."
"May an elephant caress you with his toes"
"Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants."
"If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps."
"Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth.""
"Primate and elephant and even pig societies show considerable evidence of care for others, parent-child bonding, solidarity in the face of danger, and so on."
"But as the work proceeded I was continually reminded of the fable about the elephant and the tortoise. Having constructed an elephant upon which the mathematical world could rest, I found the elephant tottering, and proceeded to construct a tortoise to keep the elephant from falling. But the tortoise was not more secure than the elephant, and after some twenty years of very arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable."
"You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that's the bunk. It's little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes."
"Studying elephants is like going back into prehistoric times. In size, elephants are the closest thigns we have to dinosaurs. There are days when I feel as though there is nothing we can do for elephants - I feel that the only good I am doing is recording the extinction of one of the most magnificent animals that ever walked the earth."
"This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat."
"We came here for a small, informal meeting. We find you've turned it into a circus. Well, if you're going to have a circus, you've got to have elephants."
"An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile."
"If you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun."
"The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure."
"When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it - philosopically speaking - make a noise"
"The elephant needs a thousand times more food than the ant but that is not an indication of inequality."
"Do not be thoughtless, always be mindful, watch your thoughts! Draw yourself out of the path of evil, like an elephant sunk in mud."
"One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot."
"We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them."
"Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars."
