Elephants famous quotes

OK, the rule is, you can [make love to] an elephant if you want to, but if you do you can't cover the circus.
-- A. M. Rosenthal

#Elephants #Making Love #Want

They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies…the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you. When you're stumped, go to your notes like a wizard to his spellbook. Mash those thoughts together. Extend them in every direction until they meet.
-- Aaron Koblin

#Get Well #Technology #Elephants

When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
-- Abraham Lincoln

#Running #Acceptance #Elephants

They can't expect anyone to actually pay for a shirt that says, 'I (picture of an elephant) the San Diego Zoo.' What does that even mean?
-- Adam Rex

#Zoos #Mean #Elephants

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

#Success #Eye #Elephants

Elephants are highly emotional. Whatever they are feeling, they let it out immediately, and the histrionics are over and forgotten in a moment, lasting no longer than the cloud formations that are constantly coming apart and re-forming overhead. There is no guile in pachyderms.
-- Alex Shoumatoff

#Emotional #Clouds #Elephants

Kat had been picking things up since her third birthday, when Hamish and Angus's father took them all to the circus because he needed to "borrow" an elephant.
-- Ally Carter

#Father #Elephants #Circus

I am persuaded that if the brutes even--if the dog, the horse, the ox, the elephant, the bird, could speak, they would confess, that, at the bottom of their nature, their instincts, their sensations, their obtuse intelligence, assisted by organs less perfect than ours, there is a clouded, secret sentiment of this existence of a superior and primordial Being, from whom all emanates, and to whom all returns.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine

#Dog #Horse #Elephants

The knife flaying the elephant does not have to be large, only sharp!
-- Andre Norton

#Knives #Elephants #Doe

The worst place to be is in the middle. When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.
-- Andrew Vachss

#Fighting #Elephants #Grass

Elephants and grandchildren never forget.
-- Andy Rooney

#Grandmother #Grandchildren #Elephants

I was called 'Dumbo,' like the elephant, as a child because I couldn't understand things at school.
-- Anthony Hopkins

#Children #School #Elephants

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

#Elephants #Drawing #Hats

Psychoanalysts and elephants, they never forget.
-- Arthur Laurents

#Elephants #Never Forget #Forget

It is better to own 10% of an elephant than 100% of a rat.
-- Arthur Mutambara

#Elephants #Rats

Jackie had a keen eye for talent, and like an elephant never forgot. And, he was always right on the mark.
-- Audrey Meadows

#Eye #Elephants #Talent

The world is not a burden; we make it a burden by our desires. When the desires are removed, the world is as light as a feather on an elephant's back.
-- Baba Hari Dass

#Light #Elephants #Desire

I couldn't hit an elephant's ***** with a bull fiddle.
-- Babe Didrikson Zaharias

#Elephants #Bulls #Ass

Les vrais philosophes sont comme les e  le  phants, qui en marchant ne posent jamais le second pied a'   terre que le premier ne soit bien affermi. True philosophers are like elephants, who when walking never placetheir second footontheground untilthefirst is steady.
-- Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

#Elephants #Philosopher #Steady

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.
-- Bertrand Russell

#Fall #Elephants #Years

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
-- Beryl Markham

#Men #Elephants #Rivers

I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
-- Beryl Markham

#Gun #Men #Elephants

[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves - Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets - and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.
-- Beryl Markham

#Gun #Winning #Elephants

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

#Elephants #Tongue #Turns

You know...they say an elephant never forgets. What they don't tell you is, you never forget an elephant.
-- Bill Murray

#Elephants #Never Forget #Forget

I'd like to see animals removed from the entertainment business. Chimpanzees and apes won't perform unless you beat them. Circuses keep elephants in chains 90 percent of the time. Elephants need freedom of movement. In circuses, they live in cramped quarters, which is not the life intended for them by nature. Some are beaten daily, forced to do ridiculous tricks and robbed of every shred of dignity.
-- Bob Barker

#Animal #Elephants #Needs

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

#Sports #Fighting #Elephants

Q: What's the difference between a tweaker and an elephant? A: The elephant will eat all your peanut butter.
-- Bucky Sinister

#Elephants #Differences #Peanut Butter

In my family, my fat family, none of us ever say the word 'fat.' 'Fat' is the word you hear shouted on the playground or in the street - it's never allowed over the threshold of the house. My mum won't have that filth in her house. At home together, we are safe. ... There will be no harm to our feelings here because we never acknowledge fat exists. We never refer to our size. We are the elephants in the room.
-- Caitlin Moran

#Home #Elephants #House

As Dr. Chiang puts it, “while Buddha came to China on white elephants, Christ was borne on cannon balls.
-- Carlo M. Cipolla

#Elephants #White #Drs

Maybe it’s animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting.
-- Carol Emshwiller

#Snakes #Elephants #Grace

I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.
-- Catherynne M. Valente

#Elephants #Different #Had Enough

I have a face like the behind of an elephant.
-- Charles Laughton

#Elephants #Complaining #Faces

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

#Elephants

I really enjoyed staying at an encampment at the top of a hill in the Samburu Reserve in Kenya. You reach it on a small plane; there is no electricity, no city noises and you sleep and shower under the Milky Way, with moths fluttering around a kerosene lamp, knowing that there are elephants and lions roaming free in the valley.
-- Cherie Lunghi

#Sleep #Cities #Elephants

Don’t try to eat an elephant for lunch.
-- Chris Bradford

#Elephants #Lunch #Trying

Elephants suffer from too much patience. Their exhibitions of it may seem superb,-such power and such restraint, combined, are noble,-but a quality carried to excess defeats itself.
-- Clarence Day

#Elephants #Suffering #Quality

There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down
-- Clifford Geertz

#Turtles #Elephants #Stories

We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.
-- Colin Mochrie

#Elephants #Documentaries

It's very difficult to move yourself up bit by bit. It's like trying to eat an elephant for God's sake. I can do it. It's just I have to have it bite by bite, you know. It's possible. You can eat an elephant, but you have to do it bite by bite. You can't do it all in one go.
-- Colin Montgomerie

#Moving #Golf #Elephants

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time.
-- Creighton W. Abrams, Jr.

#Elephants #Eating

Animals are indeed more ancient, more complex and in many ways more sophisticated than us. They are more perfect because they remain within Nature’s fearful symmetry just as Nature intended. They should be respected and revered, but perhaps none more so than the elephant, the world’s most emotionally human land mammal.
-- Daphne Sheldrick

#Animal #Land #Elephants

She was a beautiful woman." Gavner sighed, tracing the outline of one of the elephants. "She just had very bad taste in underwear …" "And in boyfriends," I added impishly. Mr. Crepsley burst into laughter at that
-- Darren Shan

#Beautiful #Laughter #Elephants

When you hear the elephant music you're hearing what they mean to make.
-- Dave Soldier

#Mean #Elephants #Listening

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?
-- David Attenborough

#Book #Grandchildren #Elephants

We already live a very long time for mammals, getting three times as many heartbeats as a mouse or elephant. It never seems enough though, does it?
-- David Brin

#Elephants #Long #Mammals

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
-- Desmond Tutu

#Bullying #Peace #Elephants

If you offer them some sugarcane, even elephants can do this, sometimes on the first try.
-- Dharma Mittra

#Yoga #Elephants #Trying

I feel as if I go to Africa, I may never come back. I'm just going to live with the animals and adopt an elephant, and it's going to be my friend.
-- Dianna Agron

#Animal #Elephants #May

Women and elephants never forget.
-- Dorothy Parker

#Memories #Inspiration #Elephants

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive.
-- Douglas Coupland

#Memories #Elephants #White

Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?
-- Dr. Seuss

#Math #Thinking #Elephants

The elephant which supports the world is called Muha-pudma, and the the tortoise which supports the elephant is called Chukwa. In some of the Eastern mythologies we are told that the world stands on the backs of eight elephants, called Achtequed-jams.
-- E. Cobham Brewer

#Elephants #Eight #Support

If you've never seen an elephant ski, you've never been on acid.
-- Eddie Izzard

#Funny #Elephants #Acid

Mother elephants in the circus cannot help their babies, but we can,
-- Edie Falco

#Mother #Baby #Elephants

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

#Elephants #World #Beast

What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.
-- Eero Saarinen

#Practice #Elephants #Rabbits

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

#Home #Compassion #Elephants

Southampton's barrage balloons floated gleaming in the moonlight like the ghosts of elephants and hippos.
-- Elizabeth Wein

#Elephants #Balloons #Ghost

when there's an elephant in the room, you can't pretend it isn't there and just discuss the ants.
-- Ellen Wittlinger

#Elephants #Rooms #Ants

We can't have these great corporations crowding competition off the sidewalks. It's like an elephant saying, "Everyone for himself," as he dances among the chickens.
-- Emanuel Celler

#Elephants #Competition #Politics

I have family in Tanzania. I can't even explain the joy of riding through the Tanzania national park and seeing giraffes run across the road and elephants over in a pond and baboons running.
-- Emanuel Cleaver

#Running #Elephants #Joy

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, 'with four parameters I can fit an elephant and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.'
-- Enrico Fermi

#Elephants #Four #Remember

Starting with a party scene for 600 cast and end up singing on top of a giant elephant...does it get any better than this?
-- Ewan McGregor

#Party #Elephants #Singing

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.
-- Frans de Waal

#Elephants #Apes #Social

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.
-- Frans de Waal

#Animal #Hands #Elephants

I was driving pretty much the way everyone drives in LA, like elephants dancing on each others’ backs at a circus.
-- Gary Reilly

#Elephants #Dancing #Circus

The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
-- Gene Spafford

#Elephants #Mind #Internet

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficult, elephants and poodles find many things obscure.
-- Georg C. Lichtenberg

#Elephants #Poodles #Judgment

The pointes for girls, I always say, have to be like an elephant's trunk; strong and yet flexible and soft.
-- George Balanchine

#Girl #Strong #Elephants

We are not the only animal that mourns; apes do, and elephants, and dogs. Yet we are the only one that tortures.
-- Geraldine Brooks

#Dog #Animal #Elephants

The world is hollow. It's a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant.
-- Geraldine McCaughrean

#Eggs #Elephants #World

Ghostface, catch the blast of a hype verse, My glock bursts, leave in a hearse, I did worse. I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk, Ya head rush, fly like Egyptian musk.
-- Ghostface Killah

#Rap #Elephants #Hype

We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
-- Graydon Carter

#Elephants #Self #Empathy

A man would rather be trampled by elephants on fire than tell you he's just not that into you.
-- Greg Behrendt

#Men #Fire #Elephants

Letter 1 To the princess of the elephants, I disappeared exactly one year ago. On that day I received a letter. It called me back to the place where my life with the elephants began Please forgive me, for the silence between us has been unbroken for one year. I will never be more of myself than in these letters. They are my maps of the bird path, and they are all that I know to be true.
-- Gregory Colbert

#Princess #Years #Elephants

Every culture from the Egyptians to the Mayans to the American Indians to the Bedouins created bestiaries that enabled them to express their relationship with nature. Ashes and Snow is a 21st-century bestiary filled with species from around the world. Nature’s orchestra includes not just Homo sapiens but elephants, whales, manatees, eagles, cheetahs, orangutans, and many others.
-- Gregory Colbert

#Eagles #Whales #Elephants

The reason I know about 'Tomb Raider' is from when I was researching 'Elephant.' It was 1999, and I was trying to research the Columbine-massacre kids, and they had played video games, and I, at the time, had never really seen one. It was a world I didn't know.
-- Gus Van Sant

#Kids #Games #Elephants

There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.
-- Gus Van Sant

#Wise #Editing #Elephants

Women and elephants never forget an injury.
-- Hector Hugh Munro

#Women #Elephants #Never Forget

I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.
-- Herb Caen

#Memories #Elephants #Remember

Right now I've got just two rules to live by. Rule one: don't taunt elephants. Rule two: don't stand next to anybody who taunts elephants. -Sergeant Schlock
-- Howard Tayler

#Elephants #Two #Next

Oh, it's you," Curran's voice said quietly. "I thought it was an elephant.
-- Ilona Andrews

#Elephants #Voice #Said

Remember this, for it is as true as true gets: Your body is not a lemon. You are not a machine. The Creator is not a careless mechanic. Human female bodies have the same potential to give birth as well as aardvarks, lions, rhinoceri, elephants, moose, and water buffalo. Even if it has not been your habit throughout your life so far, I recommend that you learn to think positively about your body.
-- Ina May Gaskin

#Thinking #Elephants #Giving

We have to be aggressive when those we stick up for have no voice. I don't consider it radical to say cruelty is wrong and that animals should be respected. I consider it radical to eat corpses, put electrodes in animals' heads, make elephants live in chains in the circus, and poison animals we consider a nuisance.
-- Ingrid Newkirk

#Animal #Elephants #Voice

It wasn't that I hated being asked a bunch of questions. I had nothing against questions. I just didn't like listening to them, because some questions take forever to make sense. Sometimes waiting for a question to finish is like watching someone draw an elephant starting with the tail first. As soon as you see the tail your mind wanders all over the place and you think of a million other animals that also have tails until you don't care about the elephant because it's only one thing when you've been thinking about a million others.
-- Jack Gantos

#Thinking #Animal #Elephants

--

A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane.
-- Jackie Kennedy

#Elephants #Camels #Jet Planes

What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.
-- Jacques Monod

#Elephants

I find it striking that the quality of the urban habitat of ***** sapieans is so weakly researched compared to the habitats of gorillas, elephants, and Bengal tigers and panda bears in China…you hardly see anything on the habitat of man in the urban environment.
-- Jan Gehl

#Men #Elephants #Quality

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

#Cells #Elephants #Body

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant's foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet's ability to self-heal.
-- Jeremy Clarkson

#Nature #Self #Elephants

I'm an elephant today. I will need to have lots of room and also a bowl of water on the floor.
-- Jesse Ball

#Elephants #Water #Needs

It's hard for the donkeys to win the race if they're going to carry the elephants on their backs.
-- Jim Hightower

#Winning #Race #Elephants

As big as an elephant is, a whale is still larger. Everything's relative. Even gods have their spot on the food chain.
-- Jim Starlin

#Whales #Elephants #Bigs

It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants.
-- John D. MacDonald

#Children #Thinking #Elephants

Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing.
-- John Donne

#Elephants #Masterpiece #Great Things

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

#Anger #Men #Elephants

It was six men of Hindustan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (Though all of them were blind) That each by observation Might satisfy the mind.
-- John Godfrey Saxe

#Men #Elephants #Mind

In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim.
-- John Owen

#Elephants #Swim #Wade