Insect Inspirational Quotes

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Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.
Albert Einstein
Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland)
Douglas Adams
One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.
Gabriel García Márquez
Politics. The word is taken from the Ancient Greek. “Poly” means “many.” And ticks are tiny, bloodsucking insects.
Michael Dobbs (House of Cards: The dark political thriller that inspired the hit Netflix series)
Despite its dark veins, the transparency of dragonfly’s wings assures me of a pure, innocent world
Munia Khan
If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them.
Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)
Eighty-five percent of recorded species live in the terrestrial realm, and the majority of these, some 850,000, are arthropods (that is, insects, spiders, and crustaceans). Most of the arthropod species are insects, and almost half of these are beetles, a fact that is said to have inspired a famous epigram from the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane. On being asked, one day, by some clerical gentlemen what his study of the natural world had revealed to him about God. Haldane is said to have replied that it indicated that He had "an inordinate fondness of beetles.
Richard E. Leakey (The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind)
I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred and ten, everything--every dot, every dash--will live
Katsushika Hokusai
In 1924, Nikola Tesla was asked why he never married? His answer was this: "I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship. But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man - in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization. Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again. Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it - and there is striking evidence at hand that they do - then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history. Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects - a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life. The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me." Galveston Daily News, Galveston, Texas, page 23. August 10, 1924.
Nikola Tesla
When Elin watched the honeybees or other creatures in the wild, when she observed the diversity of their life cycles and the astounding precision of their habits, there were times when she felt herself become a prick of light in the vastness of the night sky, times when all living things, people, beasts and insects, dwindled to equal points of light twinkling in the darkness.
Nahoko Uehashi (The Beast Player (The Beast Player, #1-2))
Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'.
Peter Wohlleben
Sow the seeds of weakness and inferiority in the kids and they’ll grow up to be inferior, crawling, insignificant insects. Sow the seeds of courage and they’ll become brave-heart leaders who will one day change the course of human history.
Abhijit Naskar (The Education Decree)
The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.
LeRoy Pollock
The human race is one of the few creatures whom can cry tears. If you look at us we are running around like small insects—all submerged in our own important errands. Everyone blind of whats going on underneath their own noses. We can be compassionate as well as evil. We can love and we can destroy. I will always wonder how the same creature can do both. Oxymoron.” Everything Changes, Always.
Adrian Sandvaer (Bright Moments - A Journey In The Human Mind)
Politics. The word is taken from the Ancient Greek. “Poly” means “many.” And ticks are tiny, bloodsucking insects. Monday,
Michael Dobbs (House of Cards: The dark political thriller that inspired the hit Netflix series)
Those half-learn'd witlings, num'rous in our isle As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile
Alexander Pope (An Essay On Criticism)
On a deep level, the bees were teaching me the importance of taking care of myself. I could see, with my very own eyes, that defeat was not a natural way to be, even for insects.
Meredith May (The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees)
Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair, and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair; but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread, sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head; and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame, and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame. Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants, and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance! And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint, and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print. And it's thus with worldly troubles; when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts.
Walt Mason
Espresso The black coffee they serve out of doors among tables and chairs gaudy as insects. Precious distillations filled with the same strength as Yes and No. It’s carried out from the gloomy kitchen and looks into the sun without blinking. In the daylight a dot of beneficent black that quickly flows into a pale customer. It’s like the drops of black profoundness sometimes gathered up by the soul, giving a salutary push: Go! Inspiration to open your eyes.
Tomas Tranströmer (New Collected Poems)
The ”Dean of science fiction writers” Robert A. Heinlein once said: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialisation is for insects.
Neil Hawkesford (A Foolish Odyssey: An Inspirational Story Of Conformity, Awakening and Escape (A Foolish Trilogy Book 2))
To write, to be able to write, what does it mean? It means spending long hours dreaming before a white page, scribbling unconsciously, letting your pen play round a blot of ink and nibble at a half-formed word, scratching it, making it bristle with darts and adorning it with antennae and paws until it loses all resemblance to a legible word and turns into a fantastic insect or a fluttering creature half butterfly, half fairy. To write is to sit and stare, hypnotized, at the reflection of the window in the silver ink-stand, to feel the divine fever mounting to one's cheeks and forehead while the hand that writes grows blissfully numb upon the paper. It also means idle hours curled up in the hollow of the divan, and then the orgy of inspiration from which one emerges stupefied and aching all over, but already recompensed and ladened with treasures that one unloads slowly on to the virgin page in the little round pool of light under the lamp. To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. To write is the joy and torment of the idle. Oh to write! From time to time I feel a need, sharp as thirst in summer, to note and to describe. And then I take up my pen again and attempt the perilous and elusive task of seizing and pinning down, under its flexible double-pointed jib, the many-hued, fugitive, thrilling adjective.… The attack does not last long; it is but the itching of an old scar.
Colette Gauthier-Villars (The Vagabond)
...If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and swing and nock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no purpose—something senseless inspires them. (28)
Virginia Woolf (Jacob's Room)
All things are a living message from creation to mankind; all things, even the smallest blade of grass or the smallest insect. Each carries its own message about life and has an understanding of its role and what it is to accomplish during its lifetime.
Janet G Nestor
(I know, it's a poem but oh well). Why! who makes much of a miracle? As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love--or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with my mother, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the fields, Or birds--or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down--or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring; Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best-- mechanics, boatmen, farmers, Or among the savans--or to the soiree--or to the opera, Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery, Or behold children at their sports, Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman, Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial, Or my own eyes and figure in the glass; These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring--yet each distinct, and in its place. To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; Every spear of grass--the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that concerns them, All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. To me the sea is a continual miracle; The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the waves--the ships, with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?
Walt Whitman
But in vain did he apostrophize the insect in this new language, born of sudden inspiration, as a cockroach's understanding is not equal to such a tirade: the insect continued on its journey to a corner of the room, with movements sanctified by an ageless ritual of the cockroach world.
Bruno Schulz (The Street of Crocodiles)
My soul is no different from a Lotus flower. I didn’t start my journey in fresh water because my environment was not pleasant. Just like a Lotus flower, my life was surrounded by insects, debris, and so many unpleasant things and people. However, just like the Lotus petals are never contaminated by the murky water, my core remained pure. Just like the Lotus flower, I came from a place of suffering. However, I remained true to myself. I have overcome many obstacles in my life. I am proud of myself—because this time, I jumped a little higher over the hurdles. I have finished the never-ending race. I have officially crossed the finish line and have a fresh start! I am renewed, and I am loved!
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
You and me together, you-and-me-together, you and me. It was a thought that woke her from slumber, like inspiration or a stomachache. It was a notion that could not be doused, couldn’t be extinguished, except by the motion of her brush. She was painting to quiet her thoughts, the way they scribbled themselves in her mind, leaping and darting like insects, alighting on different planes.
Olivie Blake (Alone With You in the Ether)
Your body is the form lent to you by heaven and earth. Your life is not your possession, it is the harmony temporarily granted to you by heaven and earth. Your life destiny is not your possession, it is a flow granted to you temporarily by heaven and earth. Your children and grandchildren are not your possessions, heaven and earth have lent them to you to be cast off as an insect sheds its skin.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
Designing a railway using slime mold might seem like an esoteric illustration of learning simple rules from the experience of others, but drawing inspiration for simple rules from the animal world is not so rare. Termites, bees, and other social insects provide a particularly fertile source of simple rules. They have enough collective intelligence to accomplish complex tasks like finding nests or migrating long distances, but since each animal has little brainpower and few physical skills, their actions can often be captured by simple rules.
Donald Sull (Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World)
Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.’ [p.458]
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
Sometimes time can play tricks. One moment it idles by, an hour can seem a lifetime, such as when sitting by the river at dusk watching the bats snatching insects above the limpid waters; the breaching fish causing ringed ripples and a satisfying plop. Other times, time flashes by in an immodest fashion. So it is with the start of war. First time quivers with the last strum of a wonderful peace, the note holding in the air, mysterious and haunting, filling the listener with awe. Then, with a rising crescendo the terror starts with uncouth haste; with a boom the listener is shaken from their reverie and delivered into the servitude, of an ear-shattering cacophony.
M.A. Lossl (Mizpah Cousins: life, love and perilous predicaments during the Great War era.)
Never play the princess when you can be the queen: rule the kingdom, swing a scepter, wear a crown of gold. Don’t dance in glass slippers, crystal carving up your toes -- be a barefoot Amazon instead, for those shoes will surely shatter on your feet. Never wear only pink when you can strut in crimson red, sweat in heather grey, and shimmer in sky blue, claim the golden sun upon your hair. Colors are for everyone, boys and girls, men and women -- be a verdant garden, the landscape of Versailles, not a pale primrose blindly pushed aside. Chase green dragons and one-eyed zombies, fierce and fiery toothy monsters, not merely lazy butterflies, sweet and slow on summer days. For you can tame the most brutish beasts with your wily wits and charm, and lizard scales feel just as smooth as gossamer insect wings. Tramp muddy through the house in a purple tutu and cowboy boots. Have a tea party in your overalls. Build a fort of birch branches, a zoo of Legos, a rocketship of Queen Anne chairs and coverlets, first stop on the moon. Dream of dinosaurs and baby dolls, bold brontosaurus and bookish Belle, not Barbie on the runway or Disney damsels in distress -- you are much too strong to play the simpering waif. Don a baseball cap, dance with Daddy, paint your toenails, climb a cottonwood. Learn to speak with both your mind and heart. For the ground beneath will hold you, dear -- know that you are free. And never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.
Clementine Paddleford
[M]echanization is incompatible with inspiration. [...] Among the many and enormous advantages of efficient automatic machinery is this: it is completely foolproof. But every gain has to be paid for: The automatic machine is fool-proof; but just because it is fool-proof it is also grace-proof. The man who tends such a machine is impervious to every form of aesthetic inspiration, whether of human or of genuinely spiritual origin. [...] The industrious bird or insect is inspired, when it works, by the infallible animal grace of instinct - by Tao as it manifests itself on the level immediately above the physiological. The industrial worker at his fool-proof and grace-proof machine does his job in a man-made universe of punctual automata - a universe that lies entirely beyond the pale of Tao on any level, brutal, human or spiritual.
Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)
You know why Antoinette will persevere, just as you and I will?" "Why?" she asks, searching my eyes. "Because she's a lotus, and so are we." "A lotus?" I smile to myself, recalling the story Papa told me as a girl. "The flower. Have you seen one?" "They're gorgeous," I say. "But my point isn't about their beauty. Lotus flowers lead harrowing journeys. Their seeds sprout in murky swamp water, thick with dirt and debris and snarls of roots. For a lotus to bloom, she must forge her way through this terrible darkness, avoid being eaten by fish and insects, and keep pressing onward, innately knowing, or at least hoping, that there is sunlight somewhere above the water's surface, if she can only summon the strength to get there. And when she does, she emerges unscathed by her journey and blooms triumphantly." I place both of my hands on her shoulders. "Suzette, you are a lotus.
Sarah Jio (All the Flowers in Paris)
It is quiet in the clearing, though gradually Lillian's ears attune to the soft rustling of insects and birds moving through the undergrowth, the faraway tapping of a woodpecker high in a tree. Down on the ground, a bronze-colored beetle tries to scale the side of her shoe. It slips on the smooth leather and tumbles back into the dry leaves, waggling its legs in the air. She shifts slightly on the tree trunk then watches as Jack pulls a strand of grass from a clump growing nearby and sucks on one end, looking about at the canopy overhead. "Wonderful light," he murmurs. "I wish I hadn't left my sketchbook at the house." She knows she must say something. But the moment stretches and she can't find the words so instead she looks about, trying to see the clearing as he might, trying to view the world through an artist's eyes. What details would he pull from this scene, what elements would he commit to memory to reproduce on paper? A cathedral, he'd said; and she supposes there is something rather celestial and awe-inspiring about the tall, arched trees and the light streaming in golden shafts through the soft green branches, filtered as though through stained glass.
Hannah Richell (The Peacock Summer)
Einstein, on the other hand, believed, as did Spinoza, that a person’s actions were just as determined as that of a billiard ball, planet, or star. “Human beings in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free but are as causally bound as the stars in their motions,” Einstein declared in a statement to a Spinoza Society in 1932. Human actions are determined, beyond their control, by both physical and psychological laws, he believed. It was a concept he drew also from his reading of Schopenhauer, to whom he attributed, in his 1930 “What I Believe” credo, a maxim along those lines: I do not at all believe in free will in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying, “A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,” has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life’s hardships, my own and others’, and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance. Do you believe, Einstein was once asked, that humans are free agents? “No, I am a determinist,” he replied. “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.
Salman Khan (Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing))
The body, whether it be human, mammal or insect, is nothing more than a machine designed as a vehicle intended to be used by the "soul." The brain, is perfected engineering inspired by divinity. Therefore, the world we see and touch is just an illusion because life and death are one in the same; essentially, we are heaven, eternal and ever lasting.
Alejandro C. Estrada
As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.
Gerry Abbey (Cheers, Beers, and Eastern Promise)
I'd rather die a legend, than live as an insect.
Abhijit Naskar
Fertilizing Unless your soil is fabulously fertile, some supplemental fertilizer is very nice for your roses. It inspires robust growth and more flowers. Also, a well-nourished plant is healthier and is thus less likely to succumb to stress, disease, or insect attacks. Use an all-purpose garden fertilizer, because it has balanced amounts of N (nitrogen), P (phosphorus), and K (potassium). Fertilizers touted especially for roses — such as Rose Food — are fine but not mandatory. In spring, as the plant emerges from dormancy, you can water with a tablespoon of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) dissolved in a gallon of water to promote strong canes.
Steven A. Frowine (Gardening Basics For Dummies)
I'm inspired by how dragonflies are both tough and fragile; fierce and mild.
Cindy Crosby (Chasing Dragonflies: A Natural, Cultural, and Personal History)
My eyes flickered toward the kitchen window. There she was, a large blue dragonfly (une libellule), zipping around in the blue sky, soaring and diving, never crashing down. These beautiful insects were the reason my grand-mère named the restaurant Les Libellules. I knew she wasn't the same one my grand-mère had discovered when she'd found her inspiration, but part of me wanted to believe that this marvelous creature, its iridescent wings sparkling in the sunlight, embodied her spirit, and the crazy notion that she was checking in on me bolstered my confidence.
Samantha Verant (Sophie Valroux's Paris Stars (Sophie Valroux #2))
Meadows would bore without greenery, and woods would be silent without birds and insects. There would have been no thrill had the stream or brook not babbled or trickled.
Shree Shambav (Twenty + One - 21 Short Stories - Series II)
Some Basic Needs We All Have Autonomy Choosing dreams/goals/values Choosing plans for fulfilling one’s dreams, goals, values Celebration Celebrating the creation of life and dreams fulfilled Celebrating losses: loved ones, dreams, etc. (mourning) Integrity Authenticity Creativity Meaning Self-worth Interdependence Acceptance Appreciation Closeness Community Consideration Contribution to the enrichment of life Emotional Safety Empathy Honesty (the empowering honesty that enables us to learn from our limitations) Love Reassurance Respect Support Trust Understanding Physical Nurturance Air Food Movement, exercise Protection from life-threatening forms of life: viruses, bacteria, insects, predatory animals Rest Sexual Expression Shelter Touch Water Play Fun Laughter Spiritual Communion Beauty Harmony Inspiration Order Peace
Marshall B. Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides))
The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Aatish Taseer (The Way Things Were)
As a boy, I had the privilege of realizing that nature only moves and grows in precise, turbulent, spiraling flows. As an adult, I learned that human technology, in the main, tries to suppress turbulence. Nature doesn't waste the opportunity. It exploits the energy that is rolled up in turbulence. Birds, insects, fish, and the human heart clearly demonstrate the advantage of this strategy. Humans insist on traveling in straight lines and guzzle energy. Nature travels in spirals and sips energy. Truly grasping the significance of this simple fact throws open the door to reinventing the industrial world and gives us the tools to rescue our ailing planet, populations, and economy. By adapting and applying nature's spiraling geometries, I am confident that we can halve the world's energy consumption-without sacrifice.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
Whether or not one believes in the accelerating dangers of the climate crisis, the end of fossil fuels, or the permanent annihilation of species of plants, insects and animals that essentially cover our ass by maintaining an inconceivably complex environment in which we have the freedom and responsibility to do pretty much whatever we’d like, it’s not too difficult to at least perceive the dangers of heightened tensions between cultures that now, for the first time, have the power to annihilate each other or the entire planet.
Darrell Calkins
There is not a scientist on earth today who can fully explain and replicate the flight efficiency of a single insect or the swimming ability of any fish. No man-made pump and piping can match the efficiency of the human heart and vascular system. Globally, we devote huge amounts of energy to cool our computers, yet nature's super-computer, the human brain, has not heating problem at all. As we'll see repeatedly throughout this book, nature always uses the least energy and the least materials for the job. Nature and humans use dramatically opposed strategies for drag reduction and neither borrows from the other.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
It seemed that no matter what we did on the land, no matter how much we worked or how hard we worked or how fervently we prayed, nature’s forces were mostly working against us. We had to offer up a portion of our work and bounty to the heartless gods of rain and wind and frost and snow, to rats and mice and birds and beetles, to foxes and rabbits and hares and snails, to millions of insects of all manner and kind, to tinkers and gypsies and beggers and blight. And still we lived and the battle went on – with God’s unwavering help, as Mom would say.
Tom Gallagher (Tara's Halls: Growing Up in Hard Times in Ireland: An Inspiring Memoir)
Even a one-inch insect has half an inch of soul. It doesn't matter if people are going to forget the Sekiho Army. But I can't throw away my half-inch of life.
Sagara Sanosuke
From the roars of beasts springs forth praise The buzz of the insects and bees serenades praise The fish inhales and exhales praise And everything that breathes praise Him
Maisie A Smikle
GODMAN QUOTES 18 ***Dynamics of life**** Don’t give us what we haste for…give us what need to overcome our challenges. Always seek help where it’s not needful than where it’s not given. It’s a promise of a coming future to fulfill the future with a promising hope. Your limit is where you place your boundary. Life formulae states; give to life better than you expect. When life has no reason to fail you; this is equivalent to success. The biggest and most humble city in the world is obesity; this is a sizeable and social definition. Owe life nothing but to enjoy and endure it. Where a flower blossoms there you find a missing insect If you are fulfilled your destiny will be full of bliss.
Godman Tochukwu Sabastine
We should be listening to the stars in the heavens and the sun and the moon, to the mountains and the plains, to the forest and rives and seas that surround us, to the meadows and the flowering grasses, to the songbirds and the insects and to their music especially in the evening and the early hours of the night. We ned to experience, to feel, and to see these myriad creatures all caught up in the celebration of life. [...] We have lost sight of the fact that these myriad creatures are revelations of the divine and inspirations to our spiritual life. Our inner spiritual world cannot be activated without experience of the outer world of wonder for the mind, beauty for the imagination, and intimacy for the emotions.
Thomas Berry (The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth (Ecology and Justice))
Sur la grande plaine, les énormes insectes métalliques piochaient leur butin dans les tréfonds de la terre. D'un mouvement invariable, les balanciers plongeaient dans le sol et on ne voyait plus que ces monstres d'acier déchiquetant la surface pour remonter le pétrole.
Fabrice Humbert (La Fortune de Sila)
We squatted over the hole and waited. The ant struggled in the soft, sandy trap until a pair of pincers suddenly reached up and grabbed it, thrashed up a little dust, and pulled it under. Gone, just like that. “Don’t do any more of them, Leah,” Ruth May said. “The ant wasn’t bad.” I felt embarrassed, being told insect morals by my baby sister. Usually cruelty inspired Ruth May no end, and I was just desperate to help her get her spirits back.
Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
Product that I Like." By Aron Micko H.B Arena, the most intense place; Belittle doers doing old space. Aroma smell now is embrace; Believable inspiration does race. Behavior no show cyberspace; Aurora lights direction to trace. Bottle available I thought vase; Athena the woman no replace. Area of insects fly every place; Breakable walls, now staircase. Aurora of an old do showcase; Bumble yellow shirt suitcase. Beatle seeing nope workplace; Armilla thing shines misplace. Bicycle rides the commonplace; Antenna sales I avail outpace.
Aron Micko H.B
As it turns out, this desire to be loved and to belong is not unique to emotionally needy writers spoiled by their parents. It is inherent to us all. It helps make us human. You'll find evidence of this in Brene Brown's research. She has spent the last twenty years studying the characteristics of people who, regardless of life circumstances, exhibit resilience. Using a qualitative research method known as grounded theory research, Brown conducted thousands of interviews with hundreds of people spanning all sorts of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to conclude that "a deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need for all women, men, and children." "We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong," Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection. "When those needs are not met, we don't function as we are meant to. We break. We fall apart. We hurt others. We get sick." Her research concluded that the key to connection is no mystery: "I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seemed to be struggling for it. That one thing was the belief in their worthiness. If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging." In fact, Brown defines wholehearted living as "a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness." It's important to note that Brown uncovered these findings while researching the corrosive effects of shame. Shame is the ultimate connection killer, for it tells us that our flaws make us unworthy of love. Like many researchers and psychologists, Brown draws a distinction between shame and guilt, noting that the former focuses on being while the latter focuses on behavior. While guilt says, "I did something bad," shame says, "I am bad." Studies suggest a healthy dose of guilt can actually inspire us to make healthier choices, but shame, as a rule, proves counterproductive. For people of faith, and especially for Christians, this research raises some important questions. Does any claim to our inherent worthiness contradict religious teaching and the witness of our sacred texts? Can we deal honestly with our sins without internalizing shame? Does our belief system require that we see ourselves as nothing more than loathsome insects, deserving only to be swept by tsunami waves into the fires of hell? Or can we, too, engage the world from a place of worthiness? Many of us have been talked out of that hope by a parent, a Sunday school teacher, a pastor, or perhaps even our very own fragile selves. In some way or another, many of us have become convinced that we will never be worthy of love- because of our sin, because of our humanity, and because of something that happened in a mysterious garden a long time ago.
Rachel Held Evans (Wholehearted Faith)
Self-destructing – in rock, in public, in fact anywhere – is not good for the human spirit, not to mention the lungs, liver and kidneys. Artistically, it’s best approached the way David Bowie did it in the mid-1970s. His cocaine addiction turned him into a withered stick-insect figure of a man but also inspired the best music of his entire career. Then he sorted himself out and became the golden-haired survivor we know and love today.
Nick Kent (The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music 1972-1993)
Many years ago I confronted a political activist whose inordinate desire for power was suddenly exposed. Instead of covering up and denying, he said to me: “I do not want to be an insect, like my father.” This shocking admission is something that Nietzsche, as the psychologist of the “will to power,” addressed with the following lines: What the father has hid comes out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father’s revealed secret. Inspired ones they resemble; but it is not the heart that inspires them — but vengeance. And when they become subtle and cold, it is not spirit, but envy, that makes them so. Their jealously leads them also into thinker’s paths; and this is the sign of their jealousy — they always go too far: so that their fatigue has at last to go to sleep on the snow. In all their lamentations sounds vengeance, in all their eulogies is maleficence; and being judge seems to them bliss.
J.R. Nyquist
I can never be interested in an idea to the same extent. I could never shoot myself. In spite of which, he commits suicide, although he has no hopes from suicide: I know it will be another delusion, a delusion in an infinite series of delusions. Nothing is real—consequently he has nothing to live for and no reason for dying: My love will be as petty as I am myself.... I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like some loathsome insect.... Always in Dostoevsky there is this comparison of men to insects: half a dozen passages spring to mind. It is the Hemingway position, ‘Most men ... die like animals’, or the comparison of Catherine Barkely’s death with that of ants on a burning log. There is no belief. Men’s lives are futile, and they die ‘not with a bang but a whimper’. And when they are inspired by a belief, it depends on their blinding themselves with their emotions. This is Stavrogin’s position, and he hates it. He would like to breathe clean air and feel a sensation of power. But how? To do good? That is out of the question; he sees it as a game of emotional profit, self-flattery, nothing more. Then evil ? His ‘confession’ is an account of his attempt to do evil. It is a deliberate sensation-seeking
Colin Wilson (The Outsider)
Dear Lotus Flower, Just like you, my roots were always latched in the mud. I envied you because you were in the dark, murky water only at night—when the daylight arose, you bloomed. Unlike you, I was submerged in nasty water every day and night, but the light abandoned me. Came the morning light, and somehow miraculously, you rebloomed, sparkling, and so clean. I sort of bloomed at night with the moonlight and stars. However, the next morning I wasn’t so lucky because the morning light was nowhere to be found. Things got better for me slowly but surely. I must say, no matter how many times our roots were in the dirtiest water, we survived. We survived because our roots provided the nutrients that allowed us to bloom. I read that a lotus flower at times only partially opens, and the center is hidden. Just like you, there were times when I slowly opened up to people. I hid my inner core because mentally, I didn’t know who to trust. However, I arose from the midst of suffering. Again, just like you, I withstood highly adverse conditions and had to repair myself mentally and physically. Nobody knows, but you are my favorite flowers. We are unique, and we have so much in common. Your shadowy, murky origin found enlightenment as you were on the hunt for light. I, too, was on the quest for light for many years. For 16 years, I was thirsty for light, and now my thirst is quenched. All of those years, I yearned and wanted to break free and bloom. However, I had to keep moving, growing, and believing. My soul is no different from a Lotus flower. I didn’t start my journey in fresh water because my environment was not pleasant. Just like a Lotus flower, my life was surrounded by insects, debris, and so many unpleasant things and people. However, just like the Lotus petals are never contaminated by the murky water, my core remained pure. Just like the Lotus flower, I came from a place of suffering. However, I remained true to myself. I have overcome many obstacles in my life. I am proud of myself—because this time, I jumped a little higher over the hurdles. I have finished the never-ending race. I have officially crossed the finish line and have a fresh start! I am renewed, and I am loved! Triumph should be my middle name because I never gave up.
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
A butterfly in a caterpillar prison Illustrates a solitary ideal, that ideas are the insects of achievement set aloft by chromatic, galactic wings.
E. P. Mattson (The Opulence Of Invention)
Meanwhile, the most frequent question I am casually asked about ants is, 'What do I do about the ones in my kitchen?' My answer is, Watch where you step, be careful of little lives, consider becoming an amateur myrmecologist, and contribute to their scientific study. Further, why should these wondrous little insects not visit your kitchen? They carry no disease, and may help eliminate other insects that do carry disease. You are a million times larger than each one. You could hold an entire colony in your cupped hands. You inspire fear in them; they should not in you. I recommend that you make use of your kitchen ants by feeding them and reflecting upon what you see, rather like an informal tour of a very foreign country. Place a few pieces of food the size of a thumbnail on the floor or sink. House ants are especially fond of honey, sugar water, chopped nuts, and canned tuna. A scout in close vicinity will soon find one of the baits and, to the degree the colony is hungry, run excitedly back to the nest. There will follow social behavior so alien to human experience that it might as well be on some other planet.
E.O. Wilson
The life of a man without learning is useless like the tail of a dog, which neither can hide the secret organs nor can it brush away insects.
Rajen Jani (Old Chanakya Strategy: Aphorisms)
In those days, the ancient rainforests spread from Northern California to southeastern Alaska in a band between the mountains and the sea. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture-laden air from the pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world. Trees that were born before Columbus sailed. And trees are just the beginning. The numbers of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, wildflowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and insects are staggering. It's hard to write without running out of superlatives, for these were among the greatest forests on earth, forests peopled with centuries of past lives, enormous logs and snags that foster more life after their death than before. The canopy is a multi-layered sculpture of vertical complexity from the lowest moss on the forest floor to the wisps of lichen hanging high in the treetops, raggedy and uneven from the gaps produced by centuries of windthrow, disease, and storms. This seeming chaos belies the tight web of inter-connections between them all, stitched with filaments of fungi, silk of spiders, and silver threads of water. Alone is a word without meaning in this forest.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
...le chant des oiseaux avait pratiquement disparu de la surface de la Terre. Des milliers de races d'oiseaux s'étaient éteintes progressivement, couvrant d'un silence mortuaire les aubes enchanteresses, silence aussitôt comblé par le bruit des bétonneuses, des marteaux-piqueurs, des excavateurs, des grues de chantier, dans un tonnerre métallique quotidien au service de la construction, baromètre de la santé économique des nations et de ce qui s'ensuit, la croissance en général, et l'emploi en particulier, cet emploi source de toutes les justifications. Les oiseaux mouraient des tombereaux de produits chimiques déversés sur les prés, dans un vaste holocauste de matières organiques et d'insectes. Les oiseaux aussi s'éteignaient aussi faute de place pour s'ébattre et se reproduire. La Bible, les humanistes avaient consacré l'intangibilité de la primauté de l'homme, de sa vie, de son confort sur toute autre espèce.
Marc Dugain (Transparence)
and retreat from the busy and hectic day to day daily life or the desire for fresh veggies, gardening can fill that void. In addition to providing some peace for an individual it can also provide a brilliant source of nutrition and cost savings at the dinner table. The drawback that gardeners have had to face is change of seasons, insect and rodent pests as well as fertilizing problems. Gardening methods over the years has taken a pleasant turn for the better as people are trying to re-connect to the natural way of things and are taking an organic approach to raising vegetables and fruits. It is pleasing and inspiring to witness this shift from chemical saturated food going back to the natural way it was meant to be eaten. It thrills me to contribute to this global shift! I hope our children and generations after them have many blessed years of health and abundance at their dinner tables from the positive teachings
Anthony Higgins (Successful Indoor Organic Vegetable Gardening Manual)