Elephants Quotes

About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf.

Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this
riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb.

Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incom ~ James Gould Cozzens

There is no creature among all the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of almighty God as the Elephant. ~ Edward Topsell

I had a probing mind and an elephant memory. ~ Ethel Waters

The elephant is never won by anger; nor must that man who would reclaim a lion take him by the teeth. ~ John Dryden

Holden was imagining what several hundred rounds of Teflon-coated tungsten steel going five thousand meters per second would do to human bodies when Alex threw down the throttle and a roomful of elephants swan dived onto his chest. ~ James S.A. Corey

We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge. ~ K.A. Applegate

You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his Royal Robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies. ~ Neil Gaiman

In the beginning, when Twaslitri (the Divine Artificer) came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after pro-found meditation, he did as follows: he took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sun-beams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldnesss of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together, he made woman and gave her to man.
(Written by scholars of the Vedic Age) ~ F.W. Bain

If a boy fires off a gun, whether at a fox, a landlord or a reigning sovereign, he will be rebuked according to the relative value of these objects. But if he fires off a gun for the first time it is very likely that he will not expect the recoil, or know what a heavy knock it can give him. He may go blazing away through life at these and similar objects in the landscape; but he will be less and less surprised by the recoil; that is, by the reaction. He may even dissuade his little sister of six from firing off one of the heavy rifles designed for the destruction of elephants; and will thus have the appearance of being himself a reactionary. Very much the same principle applies to firing off the big guns of revolution. It is not a man's ideals that change; it is not his Utopia that is altered; the cynic who says, "You will forget all that moonshine of idealism when you are older," says the exact opposite of the truth. The doubts that come with age are not about the ideal, but about the real. And one of the things that are undoubtedly real is reaction: that is, the practical probability of some reversal of direction, and of our partially succeeding in doing the opposite of what we mean to do. What experience does teach us is this: that there is something in the make-up and mechanism of mankind, whereby the result of action upon it is often unexpected, and almost always more complicated than we expect. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Women and elephants never forget. ~ Dorothy Parker

I've known elephants with broken hearts, others with depression. ~ Mark Shand

Elephants can sense danger. They're able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake before it hits. Unfortunately, Jack did not have this talent. The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware. ~ Jennifer Richard Jacobson

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

In terms of economical aspects, reinforcing those national parks with sophisticated anti-poaching patrols - these poachers are beefed up like the army. In the case of Cameroon, that's a perfect example of the lack of finance. The government could not provide the national park with more guards. Therefore, they lost the majority of the elephant population. I don't want to see that anywhere else. ~ Veronika Varekova

What ever happened to freak shows? Back in the twenties when elephant man was born at least he had a job waiting for him. ~ Doug Stanhope

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 ~ William Shakespeare

An elephant fell off a cliff, a copper cliff, which practically broke my heart. Elephants and gravity, not a great mix. But you know what? The other elephants immediately stopped and went down and found what was left of it and stood around it in a ring. I couldn't see what they did, but when they were done - it took a day - the one that fell was all back together and up and running again. They resurrected him, I've never seen anything like it. Elephants, they know some shit. I don't know why we rule them, they should rule us. ~ Lev Grossman

For me to put a look together, if it's going to be a boy look or a girl look or whatever, is quite a tricky thing to do. I'm not doing drag because drag is seen in a certain way and my comedy has got zero to do with what I'm wearing. I could wear an elephant suit and say the same thing. ~ Eddie Izzard

If there were no goodness in people, mankind would still be confined to loping across a Savannah somewhere on Earth, watching the elephants rule, or some other more compassionate species. ~ Orson Scott Card

He had the muscular definition of a man who had spent his life restraining elephants in heat. ~ Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turns out to be the basic unit of social life. ~ Rebecca Traister

It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild ones. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Greatly excited, and making little squeals and rumbles of pleasure, the Elephants grazed through the blue-bells, their trunks flying out to latch on to hazel branches, which they dragged and tore down and stuffed into their mouths. ~ Christopher Nicholson

Inside my soul there echoed the cry of a hundred elephants dying. ~ Selina Siak Chin Yoke

I'm told I have the body of a god."
"A Greek god, or one of those gods with the horse heads or elephant's legs coming out of their chests?" Alan asked. "Next time someone tells you that, ask them to specify. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

I don't know where I learned elephants like their tongues slapped. Whatever turns you on. ~ Betty White

I'm a floating TURNIP HEAD ~ Mo Willems

Money, power, sex ... and elephants. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes - he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying - he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person - he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword - he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love - he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void - he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds - he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni - he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face - and all of these figures and faces res ~ Hermann Hesse

When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how. ~ Robert Moor

One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife. ~ Robert T. Bakker

The Elephant Man claimed his head was big because, it's so full of dreams. Actually, it's because his skull was shaped like a turkey. ~ Dana Gould

At independence, Tanzania had 350,000 elephants ... in 1987, there were only 55,000 elephants left. ~ Jakaya Kikwete

I am further back, surrounded on all sides by wailing men, their faces shiny with tears. Uncle Al promised three dollars and a bottle of Canadian whiskey to the man who puts on the best show. You've never seen such grief
even the dogs were howling. ~ Sara Gruen

Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they're supposed to be out in the sea. ~ Jane Goodall

COBB: What do you want from us?
SAITO: Inception.
Arthur raises his eyebrows. Cobb is poker-faced.
SAITO: Is it possible?
ARTHUR: Of course not.
SAITO: If you can steal an idea from someone's mind, why can't you plant one there instead?
ARTHUR: Okay, here's planting an idea: I say to you, "Don't think about elephants."
(Saito nods)
What are you thinking about?
SAITO: Elephants.
ARTHUR: Right. But it's not your idea because you know I gave it to you.
SAITO: You could plant it subconsciously-
ARTHUR: The subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.
COBB: No, it isn't.
SAITO: Can you do it?
COBB: I won't do it.
SAITO: In exchange, I'll give you the information you were paid to steal.
COBB: Are you giving me a choice? Because I can find my own way to square things with Cobol.
SAITO: Then you do have a choice.
COBB: And I choose to leave. ~ Christopher J. Nolan

When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

If the world held magic powerful enough to make the elephant appear, then there must exist, too, magic in equal measure, magic powerful enough to undo what had been done. ~ Kate DiCamillo

A turtle without a shell is a very strange thing. Even with shells, turtles are very strange things, with their miniature elephant's feet, parrot's beak and ludicrous tail.
-pg 30 ~ Albert Sanchez Pinol

Everything - and I mean everything - fucking hurts. I feel as if I've been trampled. By elephants. Carrying wrestlers. Overweight wrestlers. ~ Ruby Dixon

Well, the big elephant in the whole system is the baby boomer generation that marches through like a herd of elephants. And we begin to retire in 2008. ~ Lindsey Graham

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect. ~ Jacqueline E. Smith

Seconds are slowly, slowly passing by; like a lazy herd of elephants, heavy and laborious. ~ Gary Edward Gedall

There we stood. Elephants to our left, lions to our right, only a stone's throw from hippos and leopards, and what were they doing? Playing with a doodlebug.
Don't we all? Myriads of mighty angels encircle us, the presence of our Maker engulfs us, the witness of a thousand galaxies and constellations calls to us, the flowing tide of God's history carries us, the crowning of Christ as King of the universe awaits us, but we can't get our eyes off of the doodlebugs of life: paychecks, gadgets, vacations, and weekends. ~ Max Lucado

The reader, knowing nothing about the 'dark continent,' filled in the blanks. Pictured Stone in a tent, kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another. ~ Abraham Verghese

What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen. ~ Jodi Picoult

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant. ~ Anne Sexton

Once we ask why it should be that all human beings - including infants, the intellectually disabled, criminal psychopaths, Hitler, Stalin, and the rest - have some kind of dignity or worth that no elephant, pig, or chimpanzee can ever achieve, we see that this question is as difficult to answer as our original request for some relevant fact that justifies the inequality of humans and other animals. ~ Peter Singer

Heat is lost at the surface, so the more surface area you have relative to volume, the harder you must work to stay warm. That means that little creatures have to produce heat more rapidly than large creatures. They must therefore lead completely different lifestyles. An elephant's heart beats just thirty times a minute, a human's sixty, a cow's between fifty and eighty, but a mouse's beats six hundred times a minute - ten times a second. Every day, just to survive, the mouse must eat about 50 percent of its own body weight. We humans, by contrast, need to consume only about 2 percent of our body weight to supply our energy requirements. One area where animals are curiously - almost eerily - uniform is with the number of heartbeats they have in a lifetime. Despite the vast differences in heart rates, nearly all animals have about 800 million heartbeats in them if they live an average life. The exception is humans. We pass 800 million heartbeats after twenty-five years, and just keep on going for another fifty years and 1.6 billion heartbeats or so. It is tempting to attribute this exceptional vigor to some innate superiority on our part, but in fact it is only over the last ten or twelve generations that we have deviated from the standard mammalian pattern thanks to improvements in our life expectancy. For most of our history, 800 million beats per lifetime was about the human average, too. ~ Bill Bryson

Mythologically speaking, if there's anything I hate worse than trios of old ladies, it's bulls. Last summer, I fought the Minotaur on top of Half-Blood Hill. This time what I saw up there was even worse: two bulls. And not just regular bulls - bronze ones the size of elephants. And even that wasn't bad enough. Naturally they had to breathe fire, too. ~ Rick Riordan

Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget. ~ Agatha Christie

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'. ~ Charlie Chaplin

People get their benefits as individuals but we all pay the cost together, same as the doomed mice of Gough island. The problem is not just fossil fuel emissions either, humans are killing rhinos, elephants, gorillas, and countless other endangered animals for no reason other than to make a few bucks. Put another way, those of us in the Western world have allowed things to get so unfair that while I stop at a Star Bucks drive-through on the way home to get a fifth of my daily required calories from a sugar-filled ice drink, someone on the other side of the world is eating an endangered fruit bat because they have no other way to get their protein. That is where acting naturally has gotten humans so far. ~ Dan Riskin

The elephant needs a thousand times more food than the ant but that is not an indication of inequality. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Over-population is the 'cause of drive-by shootings' and other social ills, but the root of the problem is Christianity, which posits that people are more important than sea otters and elephants. ~ Ted Turner

The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the forest and worked for us. They lived with us as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own. ~ Eknath Easwaran

Large organizations cannot be versatile. A large organization is effective through its mass rather than through its agility. Fleas can jump many times their own height, but not an elephant. ~ Peter Drucker

Throughout this book we have repeatedly asked what makes humans superior to other animals. Dataism has a new and simple answer. In themselves, human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, a human can write a poem about his experience and post it online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system. That makes his bits count. A wolf cannot do this. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ~ Creighton Abrams

I was still excited. Big or small, elephants are elephants, after all. Just before we mounted, when I was sure no one could see me, I quickly kissed the shoulder of my beast and murmured, 'Hey, sweetie.'
'Hey, darlin'. That was Tonio, appearing suddenly by my shoulder. He gave me a laughing look that suggested he was either amused by or attracted to women who kiss elephants for no good reason. ~ Karen Lord

How are you feeling, Willow?" Ember asked. "Like I swallowed a baby elephant," she said deadpan. "I don't know how I'm going to get through the next two months." Shannon snorted and Willow gave her a look with a raised eyebrow. "Just you wait, little girl. You're going to have two baby elephants dancing on your bladder soon." Shannon groaned. "You're cursing me," she moaned. She'd ~ J.M. Madden

Despite the reams of paperwork, obstacles worthy of a horse show, and a wait that can rival an elephant's gestation, adoption feels no different on the inside. ~ Scott Simon

Everything is 'colossalized' - events, fortunes, accidents, climate, conversation, ambitions - everything is in the extreme ... They can't even have a tram run off a line, which in England or France might kill one or two people, without its making a holocaust of half a street full ... The thing which surprises me is they should still employ animals of normal size; one would expect to see elephants and mammoths drawing the hansoms and carts! ~ Elinor Glyn

To be born, to live and to die is merely to change forms ... And what does one form matter any more than another? ... Each form has its own sort of happiness and unhappiness. From the elephant down to the flea ... from the flea down to the sensitive and living molecule which is the origin of all, there is not a speck in the whole of nature that does not feel pain or pleasure. ~ John Dewey

My circus train pulls through the night
Full of lions and trapeze artists
I'm done with elephants and clowns
I want to run away and join the office ~ Mike Doughty

They could play an endless game of hide-and -seek in so many rooms and up and down the halls that intersected and turned into dead-end porches and rooms full of wax begonias and elephant's- ears, or rooms full of trunks. She remembered the nights
the moon vine, the everblooming Cape jessamines, the verbena smelling under running feet, the lateness of dancers. ~ Eudora Welty

The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels. ~ Richard Leakey

All the religions are true, they just see a different part of the elephant. ~ George Lucas

I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. 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. They are inclined to be fat in the stomach; they dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow); wear no ... ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Elephant altruism on the Kenyan plains. With her tusks, Grace (right) lifted the fallen three-ton Eleanor to her feet, then tried to get her to walk by pushing her. But Eleanor fell again and eventually died, leaving Grace vocalizing with streaming temporal glands - a sign of deep distress. Being matriarchs of different herds, these two elephants were likely unrelated. ~ Frans De Waal

All right. Let's give you something to tell your grandkids about. Or great-grandkids. Or great-great-grandkids."
I snort with glee, delirious with excitement. Charlie winks and pours me another finger's worth of whiskey. Then, on second thought, he tips the bottle again.
I reach out and grab its neck. "Better not," I say. "Don't want to get tipsy and break a hip. ~ Sara Gruen

So oft in theologic wars, The disputants, I ween, Rail on in utter ignorance Of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant Not one of them has seen! ~ John Godfrey Saxe

It does not matter if you vote for the left or right, you are not an elephant or donkey. You are a truthful lion who stands only for your conscience. ~ Suzy Kassem

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. ~ Ramakrishna

I had to wear a fat suit to play Mma Ramotswe in 'The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.' She's described as being like a small elephant, but she loves her body and size. When we were filming in Africa, it was 110F. It was torturous. I drank a lot of water and ate cucumbers all the time, and underneath the fat suit, I shed pounds - I couldn't help it. ~ Jill Scott

Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you. ~ Bobby Knight

His eyes narrowed. "Is this where the elephants come in? Because there was something about elephants in that French book. ~ J. Kathleen Cheney

Elephants in all the worlds zoos
in old age yearn
until one morning
they say
we will set off on a journey
carrying hidden the pain that will never return
to the places where we were happy ~ Mario Payeras

The older I get, the more I see a straight path where I want to go. If you're going to hunt elephants, don't get off the trail for a rabbit. ~ T. Boone Pickens