William Butler Yeats
Poet, Playwright
"The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet."
Oxen quotes
Oxen
33 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Jules Renard
Writer
"In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring."
Gunter Grass
Novelist
"The patience of poverty. In rice fields, backs bent forever. Amazing, man outoxens the oxen and still smiles. The mystery of India, say Indologists."
William Butler Yeats
Poet, Playwright
"And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind."
Samuel Johnson
Lexicographer, Essayist, Critic
"Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat."
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Oxen quotes (page 1 of 2)
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"Tempore difficiles veniunt ad aratra juvenci; Tempore lenta pati frena docentur equi. In time the unmanageable young oxen come to the plough; in time the horses are taught to endure the restraining bit."
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"One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;" and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle."
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"Old sciences are unraveled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot."
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"The sciences are found, like Hercules's oxen, by tracing them backward; and old sciences are unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot."
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"Hither rolls the storm of heat; I feel its finer billows beat Like a sea which me infolds; Heat with viewless fingers moulds, Swells, and mellows, and matures, Paints, and flavors, and allures, Bird and brier inly warms, Still enriches and transforms, Gives the reed and lily length, Adds to oak and oxen strength, Transforming what it doth infold, Life out of death, new out of old."
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"Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange, because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison."
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"Beauty draws more than oxen."
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"Beauty drawes more then oxen."
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"It is true, these Roman Catholics, priests and all, impress me as a people who have fallen far behind the significance of their symbols. It is as if an ox had strayed into a church and were trying to bethink himself. Nevertheless, they are capable of reverence; but we Yankees are a people in whom this sentiment has nearly died out, and in this respect we cannot bethink ourselves even as oxen."
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"When the chopper would praise a pine, he will commonly tell you that the one he cut was so big that a yoke of oxen stood on its stump; as if that were what the pine had grown for, to become the footstool of oxen."
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