bugs and insects

-BUG & INSECT QUOTATIONS-

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
- - - Muhammad Ali

If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive.
- - - American Quaker Saying

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
- - - Richard Bach

I ’d be a butterfly born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet.
- - - Thomas Haynes Bayly

Habitant of castle gray,
Creeping thing in sober way,
Visible sage mechanician,
Skillfulest arithmetician.
- - - William Ellery Channing, in The New England Magazine The Spider (his first poem; published October 1835)

You hail from Dream-land, Dragon-fly?
A stranger hither? So am I,
And (sooth to say) I wonder why
We either of us came!
- - - Agnes M.F.R. Darmesteter "To a Dragon-fly"

Bees are black, with gilt surcingles -
Bucaneers of buzz.
- - - Emily Dickinson

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
- - - Buckminster Fuller

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight.
- - - Robert Graves, Flying Crooked

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
- - - Samuel Johnson

When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry red, and the seas shall be frozen over, and the icecap shall have crept downward to the equator from either pole . . . when all the cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antennae in the glow of the worn-out sun, the sole survivor of animal life on this our earth -- a melancholy bug.
- - - William Jacob Holland "The Moth Book" 1903

God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
- - - Ogden Nash "The Fly"

Some primal termite knocked on wood;
and tasted it, and found it good.
That is why your Cousin May
fell through the parlor floor today.
- - - Ogden Nash

Busy, curious, thirsty fly,
Drink with me, and drink as I.
- - - William Oldys "On a Fly Drinking out of a Cup"

The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
- - - Alexander Pope

I never could have thought of it,
To have a little bug all lit
And made to go on wings.
- - - Elizabeth Madox Roberts "Firefly"

Hurt no living thing:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
- - - Christina Georgina Rossetti

Spin and die,
To live again as butterfly.
- - - Christina Georgina Rossetti "The Caterpillar"

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky.
- - - Dante Gabriel Rossetti "Silent Noon"

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
- - - Rabindranath Tagore "Stray Birds"

Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.
- - - Mark Twain

We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics.
- - - Richard Vaughan

To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.
- - - William H. Walton

The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey.
- - - Andy Warhol

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
- - - Isaac Watts "Divine Songs"

I'VE watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly! indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless!--not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!
- - - William Wordsworth "To a Butterfly"

This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.
- - - William Butler Yeats "Another Song of a Fool"