Quotes About Ants

Earth is home to more than twelve thousand species of ants. If you weighed all the ants and all the humans, the ants would weigh more.

She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony. Some ran this way, others that.

Thoreau loved ants. He'd meet one in the morning and spend the whole day talking to him.

The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.

At high tide the fish eat ants; at low tide the ants eat fish.

Ants are among the most warlike of creatures. Their foreign policy has been described as "restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

"Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise; Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer."

Se fossimo formiche: l'intero popolo cieco si precipita nei fossati, annega, forma i ponti per i pochi sopravvissuti che sono il seme del nuovo popolo. Simili a formiche andiamo dentro ogni fuoco. Ogni acqua. Ogni fiume di sangue. Solo per non dover vedere. Che cosa? Noi.

The air reeked of pine resin and the pitchy vinegar of wood ants.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

Yet it seemed just possible that in the chaos and the destruction, the trauma and the devastation, some great natural reckoning was perhaps at work, which on a human scale found expression in the catastrophe of war and which, beyond the narrow grasp of the ordinary explanations for such disasters, was merely pursuing its own organic course. To what logic did ants turn to comprehend the fall of the gardener's spade?

Once removed from cricket, Martin became a reasonable companion again, and they took particular delight in the whinchats and wheatears on Ports Down and in a middle-spotted woodpecker eating ants like its great green cousin, which neither had seen before; but once they were in the town the future husband tended to predominate.

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

It is not easy to bring about the death of the entire race of men, and the law is there; but one may, with patience, exterminate the human ants one by one.

THE INNOCENT BOY, THE EVIL FATHER, THE ANTS, THE FISH, THE BIRDS

Don't ever step on a driver ant. If you do, fifty million of its pals could swarm all over you. Great. That's all I need, to be attacked by ants. I'd rather be attacked by ants than by a golden poison dart frog. It has enough poison in it to kill ten grown men. In that case, I'm glad I'm not a grown man yet.

i once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow s foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization

Usually we lay around on the grass all afternoon, drinking martinis from a thermos bottle and watching the ants crawl in a glittering black thread on the messy cake plate, until finally the martinis ran out, and the sun went down, and we had to straggle home for dinner in the dark.

This was an incident no one ever told my brother, an incident that everyone else in my family has forgotten, except me. One day during his illness, when my mother and I were standing over him, looking at him—he was asleep and so didn't know we were doing so—I reminded my mother of the ants almost devouring him and she looked at me, her eyes narrowing in suspicion, and she said, "What a memory you have!"—perhaps the thing she most dislikes about me.

Brunei ants even have guards that explode their own heads when threatened

The ants were busy on the ground, big black ones with shiny bodies and the little dusty quick ants. Kino watched with the detachment of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape the sand trap an ant lion had dug for him. He watched the ants moving, a little column of them near to his foot, and he put his foot in their path. Then the column climbed over his instep and continued on its way, and Kino left his foot there and watched them move over it.

But let it be clear that I consider human cities as a fully natural phenomenon, on a par with the mega-structures that other ecosystem engineers build for their societies—the only difference being that whereas ants, termites, corals, and beavers have been maintaining their roles at a stably modest level for millions of years, the scale of human ecosystem engineering has grown by several orders of magnitude over just a few thousand years.

My mother is a wonderful, eccentric lady who has no concept whatever of interior monologue. We'll be driving along in the car and she'll suddenly say, 'Ants don't like cucumbers, you know. And roaches don't like cinnamon. Do you want some cheese, Michael? Rembrandt was the Lord of the day.' -Mike Myers