Eskimo Snow Quotes

I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jewshave four hundred for schmuck.

The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

The Eskimos may have a hundred words for snow, but at that moment, I only had two: Fuck. Yeah.

If eskimos can come up with fifty words for snow because its a matter of life and death, why do we have just one word for love?

I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.

Eskimos have five words for different kinds of snow, because they live with it and it is important to them. But the Aztec language has but one word for snow, rain, and hail.

Do you love me, that's all," he said. "That's the only thing that matters." It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass's home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench...

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

... as Eskimo language is to snow, so archaic English is to 'metal objects designed to cause harm'.

Eskimos, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony [Iommi] put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of f**king nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the f**king thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly. ‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door. ‘Oh, thank f**k,’ I said. [...] ‘Halløj?’ I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?'

She remembered reading somewhere that Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. Eleanor wished there were a hundred ways to say her name. She thought, maybe, if her name was howled from all corners of the world, in a million different voices, that she might explode into a cloud of snow. Light and separate, her parts floating down onto the world in a series of beautiful crystalline moments.

He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred different words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbor’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on.

The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, and the Jews have four hundred for schmuck.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.

We must search in our way of life, I think, for substantially more here than economic expansion and continued good hunting. We need to look for a set of relationships similar to the ones Fields admired among the Eskimos. We grasp what is beautiful in a flight of snow geese rising against an overcast sky as easily as we grasp the beauty in a cello suite; and intuit, I believe, that if we allow these things to be destroyed or degraded for economic or frivolous reasons we will become deeply and strangely impoverished. ~~Crossing Open Ground

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.

His vulnerability embarrassed me, he could still feel, I should have been more careful with him. “Do you love me, that’s all,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters.” It was the language again, I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love. “I want to,” I said. “I do in a way.” I hunted through my brain for any emotion that would coincide with what I’d said. I did want to, but it was like thinking God should exist and not being able to believe.

The Eskimos may have a hundred words for snow, but at that moment, I only had two: Fuck. Yeah.

Are winters here always so mild?” “It is rarely colder,” Genji said, “so we have little need for Eskimo skills.” “My lord, please.” “Perhaps our population would be greater if it snowed.” Emily looked away, her face hot with embarrassment. She was sure she was as red as an apple ready for plucking. Genji laughed. “I’m sorry, Emily. I couldn’t resist.” “You promised you would never mention it.” “I promised I would never mention it to others. I said nothing about reminiscing with you.

Are winters here always so mild?” “It is rarely colder,” Genji said, “so we have little need for Eskimo skills.” “My lord, please.” “Perhaps our population would be greater if it snowed.” Emily looked away, her face hot with embarrassment. She was sure she was as red as an apple ready for plucking. Genji laughed. “I’m sorry, Emily. I couldn’t resist.” “You promised you would never mention it.” “I promised I would never mention it to others. I said nothing about reminiscing with you.” “Lord Genji, that is very ungentlemanly of you.” “Ungentlemanly?” “‘Un’ is a prefix meaning ‘not.’ A gentleman is a person of good character and high principle. ‘Ly’ is a suffix meaning ‘having the character of.’ ” She turned as stern a gaze on him as she could manage. “Your present behavior does not demonstrate good character and high principle.” “An unforgivable lapse. Please accept my most profound apologies.” “I would, were you not smiling in such obvious amusement.” “You are smiling, too.” “It is a grimace, not a smile.” “Grimace?” She refused to explain.

Now, there are silences, and there are silences, especially in the house where we grew up. If we’d ever talked about the silences out loud, I’m sure we’d have had a hundred different words to identify them like the Eskimos do with snow.

Meditation has nothing to do with contemplation of eternal questions, or of one’s own folly, or even of one’s navel, although a clearer view on all of these enigmas may result. It has nothing to do with thought of any kind—with anything at all, in fact, but intuiting the true nature of existence, which is why it has appeared, in one form or another, in almost every culture known to man. The entranced Bushman staring into fire, the Eskimo using a sharp rock to draw an ever-deepening circle into the flat surface of a stone achieves the same obliteration of the ego (and the same power) as the dervish or the Pueblo sacred dancer. Among Hindus and Buddhists, realization is attained through inner stillness, usually achieved through the samadhi state of sitting yoga.4 In Tantric practice, the student may displace the ego by filling his whole being with the real or imagined object of his concentration; in Zen, one seeks to empty out the mind, to return it to the clear, pure stillness of a seashell or a flower petal. When body and mind are one, then the whole thing, scoured clean of intellect, emotions, and the senses, may be laid open to the experience that individual existence, ego, the “reality” of matter and phenomena are no more than fleeting and illusory arrangements of molecules. The weary self of masks and screens, defences, preconceptions, and opinions that, propped up by ideas and words, imagines itself to be some sort of entity (in a society of like entities) may suddenly fall away, dissolve into formless flux where concepts such as “death” and “life”, “time” and “space”, “past” and “future” have no meaning. There is only a pearly radiance of Emptiness, the Uncreated, without beginning, therefore without end.5 Like the round bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its centre, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this “void”, this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one’s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as “great death”. This is the Truth of which Milarepa speaks.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday.

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow.

He could sell snow to an Eskimo. --Overheard in a Real Estate Office

I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that. ― Brian Andreas

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and as every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. Spend any amount of time in the realms of deadly force and you will witness certain of its fraught and terrible forms.

According to scientists who study avalanches for a living, snow has the widest range of physical properties of any known substance. What’s amazing is that the Eskimo language doesn’t have more words for it. Powder snow, corn snow, sugar snow, windpack. Neve, slab, spring powder, spit, and fluff. Thawing and freezing it changes with every degree of temperature, every passing second. Goose down, ball bearings, broken styrofoam. Then there are the properties of snow that are not physical, or not exactly physical: its lethal whims, its harmlessness, its delicacy, its power, its relentlessness, its flirtatious disregard, its sublime beauty.

And if you think far enough about it you know that a molecule of water that once fell from you in a tear or a drop of sweat or a drop of blood forty years ago might be back in your veins or in your bladder after having gone through the ground and down streams into the sea and around the world as vapor and clouds and back to where you are as rain or snow, and into you via your morning coffee, maybe even having passed through an Eskimo and a fox and an oak tree in the meantime.