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Ants Quotes

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Ants Quotes

“Why do you feel so powerless? Go spend an hour with ants. Each of those black specks you see is a life. One whole life that you can save, take, or affect in some way. You have the power to make so many lives better. It is within you. Don’t lose sight of that.”

LifeHelpingTogetherTimeHumanityHopeBlackChangeAnimalPowerfulPowerInfluenceCreaturesLivingHumanSightTransformationHarmonyUnityReliefHopefulLiveHopelessCooperationHelpAnimalsAssistancePowerlessHopelessnessTogethernessAntsBetterDifferenceKamandKojouriRecogniseFeelKamand KojouriLosePowerlessnessSaveTransformGuideMake A DifferenceRealizeImproveTakeRecognizeEffectShapeSpendAlterOne WorldAffectRealiseAdvanceHourAidAssistTransformativeSpeck
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.”

WarBlackRedAntsFieldWood Pile
Book:Walden or, Life in the Woods
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“it wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it .... what man calls civilization always results in deserts .... men talk of money and industry of hard times and recoveries of finance and economics but the ants wait and the scorpions wait for while men talk they are making deserts all the time getting the world ready for the conquering ant drought and erosion and desert because men cannot learn .... it wont be long now it wont be long till earth is barren as the moon and sapless as a mumbled bone”

EarthCivilizationManAntsScorpionsDesertsDon Marquis
Book:Archy does his part
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“The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.”

ScienceBrainAntsFungusCordycepsStamets
Book:How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
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“Look at all the beautiful, delicate layers! It's a perfect mille-feuille! "Heh. I call it... ...Mushroom Mille-Feuille with Duxelles Filling. Eat up!" Incredible! The exciting flavors of multiple kinds of mushrooms meld together with the crispy, ultrathin layers of piecrust in a moist and magical harmony! "The main ingredient Rindo Kobayashi chose was shiitake mushrooms! She used olive oil to cook them into a confit, trapping and magnifying their natural umami flavor!" Wait... this tang! "Aah. Champignon mushrooms and shallots, sautéed to a golden brown in garlic and butter and then simmered to a paste in broth. Cracked nuts and heavy cream were blended in to make a Duxelles, which she then sandwiched between the Mille-Feuille layers. *Duxelles is a mushroom paste often used as a base for fillings or sauces.* A perfectly balanced tart note makes the salty savoriness of the confit stand out... ... while allowing the mellow sweetness of the shiitake to linger on the tongue! Though I can't put my finger on what this sour flavor is from. What is it?" "Ants.❤️ I extracted formic acid from ants and mixed it into my Duxelles!" "WAAAAH?!" Too much formic acid is poisonous, of course. But in small amounts it can be a wonderful culinary accent. It has no extraneous sweetness, just a sharp, invigoratingly tart tang. "Not only that, if you add it to a sweet base, it can create deeper, more nuanced flavors than the more commonly used citrus fruits.”

AntsMushroomsTangFormics
Book:食戟のソーマ 30 [Shokugeki no Souma 30]
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“The road was overgrown with dry, dust-decrepit grass. Whenever Zakhar Pavlovich sat to smoke, he saw pleasant forests on the ground, where the grass was trees. It was a complete little living world, with its own roads, its own warmth, and complete supplies for the everyday needs of the petty, preoccupied creatures. Zakhar Pavlovich kept the ants in his head for about three miles of his way after watching them, and finally thought, If only we were given ant or mosquito reason, then life could be smoothed over right away, without problems. Those minor things are great masters of the harmonious life. A man's a long way from that nimble fellow, the ant.”

InsectsAntsHuman Happiness
Book:Chevengur
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“Chu considered how to describe his feelings about Nelson. Finally, after digging through his mental storehouse of erudition, he settled on the words he wanted and spoke again. "There is an American author, Flannery O'Connor. She wrote something about one of her characters that I think may explain this man. To paraphrase . . . he could have been a good man if there had been someone there to shoot him every minute of his life.”

HorrorScience FictionAntsMilitary Science Fiction
Book:Sapience
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“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forget fulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

NatureFreedomAnimalsInsectsAntsDeadlinesAerialTerrestrial
Book:Des Sociétés Animales (2e Éd.) (Éd.1878) (Sciences Sociales)
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“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forgetfulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”

NatureFreedomInsectsAntsAerialTerrestrial
Book:Des sociétés animales
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“Squatting in the coppery mud of the drainage ditch behind my cousin’s house, we searched for fish, saw none. We found a speckled frog instead, unspooling a long, gelatinous thread of black eggs in the water. Then fire ants— my feet a blaze of pain, a fumbling dance, and fact and memory begin to stutter. What happened next? What curses did I utter? And how did I ever get back over the fence? I remember having a kind of reverence for the whole affair: the pity I got, each bite growing large and lustrous as a pearl, my tight and swollen toes. I must have liked the pain. What else would make me prod again, again? A whole week hobbling barefoot on the lawn, and still I missed the welts when they were gone.”

PoetryAnts
Author:Chelsea Rathburn
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“Because the farming ants have practiced the mutual co-adaptation model during millions of years of relentless natural selection on joint performance, they often surpass us in specific efficiency targets. Not only did ants in general evolve sperm banks at ambient temperature that last a queen’s potential life span of two to three decades (Den Boer et al. 2009), but they also somehow prevented the evolution of resistance by specialized Escovopsis garden pathogens against biocontrol compounds obtained from Actinobacteria that they rear on their cuticles (De Man et al. 2016; Holmes et al. 2016; Heine et al. 2018) (chapter 11, this volume). Recent work has further indicated that the fungus-growing termites are equally efficient in keeping their colonies as free from pathogens as the leaf-cutting ants appear to be (Otani et al. 2019; see also figure 5.1C, D, E). Relative to the extreme specialization of social insect farmers, human farmers are jacks of all trades in their interactions with domesticated crops, and we remain extremely vulnerable to endemic and epidemic diseases of our cultivars.”

AntsCo Adaptation
Book:The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects
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“It occurred to Nelson, in a terrible reverie, that he had greatly underestimated these ants. That there could be dimensions to what was happening that were beyond him and that he couldn't possibly anticipate. That perhaps the ants were possessors of some kind of true intellect, capable of laying plans and responding to surprises in ways that were far more than instinctual. He drew his sidearm and whispered, almost to himself. "Run.”

HorrorScience FictionAntsMilitary Science Fiction
Book:Sapience
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“My husband is nervous about a lot of things down here, like the monstrous size of the fire ants and the quality of the gasoline, because half the time the gas stations are out, the nozzles bundled up in black garbage bags, or the credit card readers don't work or the attendant is a shirtless man with a hip flask tucked into the waistband of his shorts. I keep trying to explain that this is a place with its own laws.”

AnxietyFloridaAntsStrangenessNervousnessSpousesGas StationsHusbandsFire Ants
Book:State of Paradise
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“Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested.”

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Author:Francis Bacon
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“Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow halls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hyeroglyps, the true secret of longevity. They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn't, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.”

MagicAntsBurial
Book:Equal Rites
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“Perhaps we should rejoice that people’s emotions aren’t designed for the good of the group. Often the best way to benefit one’s group is to displace, subjugate, or annihilate the group next door. Ants in a colony are closely related, and each is a paragon of unselfishness. That’s why ants are one of the few kinds of animal that wage war and take slaves. When human leaders have manipulated or coerced people into submerging their interests into the group’s, the outcomes are some of the history’s worst atrocities.”

MindEvolutionAnimalsSociologyAntsSelfish GeneGroup Selection
Book:How the Mind Works
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“We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating, then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off the floor with a wet cloth. I took pleasure in seeing them shrivel into black points when burning coals were rolled over them. When they attacked an unwashed pan or cup they'd soon be mercilessly drowned. I suppose initially each of us did these things only when we were alone, but in time, we began to be openly cruel. We came around to Amma's view of them as demons come to swallow our home and became a family that took pleasure in their destruction. We might have changed houses since, but habits are harder to change.”

GreedCrueltyAntsHabits Of MindCharacter Flaws
Book:Ghachar Ghochar
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“It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul to particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and then one day you would wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window sills in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns. But not once did I see the trail of a column, an ant that had no other ants behind it.”

ConsumptionConsumerismAntsInfestationMetaphorical Devastation
Book:Ghachar Ghochar
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“Innovations, free thinking is blowing like a storm; those that stand in front of it, ignorant scholars like you, false scientists, perverse conservatives, obstinate goats, resisting mules are being crushed under the weight of these innovations. You are nothing but ants standing in front of the giants; nothing but chicks trying to challenge roaring volcanoes!”

ThinkingTryingScienceChallengesFrontsIgnoranceLike YouStandingScientistWeightInnovationStormIgnorantGiantsScholarAntsCrushedChicksGoatsResistingRoaringVolcanoesFree ThinkingObstinateMules
Author:Mehmet Murat Ildan
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