Quotes About Fishes

“Even more complex and dangerous than the river itself were the fishes, mammals, and reptiles that inhabited it. Like the rain forest that surrounds and depends upon it, the Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes-more than any other river system on earth. Its waters are crowded with creatures of nearly every size, shape, and evolutionary adaptation, from tiny neon tetras to thousand-pound manatees to pink freshwater boto dolphins to stingrays to armor-plated catfishes to bullsharks. By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish”

— Candice Millard

“... Perses, hear me out on justice, and take what I have to say to heart; cease thinking of violence. For the son of Kronos, Zeus, has ordained this law to men: that fishes and wild beasts and winged birds should devour one another, since there is no justice in them; but to mankind he gave justice which proves for the best.”

— Hesiod

“We can see the mind as a lotus. Some lotuses are still stuck in the mud, some have climbed above the mud but are still underwater, some have reached the surface, while others are open in the sun, stain-free. Which lotus do you choose to be? If you find yourself below the surface, watch out for the bites of fishes and turtles.”

— Ajahn Chah

“What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
Time is white
mosquitoes bite
I've spent my life on nothing.
The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something's wife.
Buzz and burn
is all I learn
I've spent my life on nothing.
I'm pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing
carpets, dishes
benches, fishes
I've spent my life in nothing.”

— Lorine Niedecker

“I have read that long ago there was a land of glass castles that sank beneath the sea. It was not called Atlantis, but Lyonesse. This happened before history and across the ocean, but when I was little I wondered about that place, how it could be so beautiful and so lost. Sometimes it seemed that the land around my New England home was like that flooded country, with mud where the streets of gold should be and mayflies swarming where there should be lovely fishes, but here and there a shard of crystal to call the heart to beauty.
"Wetlands," in Phoebe.”

— Claudia Putnam

“If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.”

— Frank Herbert

“Fishes love water,but not hot water.
Men love women,who love Delilah(Samson&Delilah)?”

— Peter Irabor

“Anyhow,' one of the scientists was saying to another, 'there simply isn't room in the museum's Fishes Hall , so we've decided to pretend to the public that a whale is actually a mammal without any legs. It's patently ridiculous - I mean to say, just look at the thing, it's a gigantic fish if ever you saw one - but mum's the word! In my experience the public will believe just about anything, so long as you write it down on a little piece of card.”

— Gideon Defoe

“Ye gods and little fishes.”

— Grace Burrowes

“They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tideline a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.”

— Cormac McCarthy

“Uncle Vito is going to make his own nephew swim with the fishes?”

— Kristen Ashley

“Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek. Love's eyes are holy things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other's eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all. Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover's eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth. Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.”

— Herman Melville

“These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer's error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?"; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment, making it "Thou shalt commit Adultery." There were the Discharge Bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly. The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! if man would but see that hope is from within and not from without-that he himself must work out his own salvation! He is there, and within him is the breath of life and a knowledge of good and evil as good and evil is to him. Thereon let him build and stand erect, and not cast himself before the image of some unknown God, modelled like his poor self, but with a bigger brain to think the evil thing, and a longer arm to do it.”

— H. Rider Haggard

“Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!”

— Virginia Woolf

“Dead before the sun rises, I said. Stars, Bob, why don't you just go over the melodramatic edge and tell me that I'm going to be sleeping with the fishes?”

— Jim Butcher

“Well, in the meantime, Carter and I have been discussing the matter of Ryan." This time it wasn't the clang of a pan I heard, but instead a messy smack
the contact of Carter's backhand with Dean's head, I presumed. "Just hear me out. You have options. I have an Italian uncle. He'll make sure Ryan is sleeping with the fishes by next week."
"Dean!" Unable to repress my amusement, my eyes flew wide and my grin grew.
"Either that, or we can go all Sweeney Todd on him and
"
"Oh, will you stop?" My laughter was crippling. "There will be no calls to your uncle and no trip to the barber shop
please, leave Sweeney Todd out of it.”

— Rachael Wade

“The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.”

— Kitty Kelley

“It is more difficult to love than to die. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love. The heart is bigger than a mountain. One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mightly plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls.”

— Ben Okri

“It is no doubt technically possible to study metabolism and respiration of fishes during swimming at a constant rate, and of certain insects and birds during flight, and to obtain information similar to that obtained on man during work on a bicycle ergometer or a treadmill.”

— August Krogh

“If you have a guru, leave him; if you don't have, get one. In other words, keep changing your gurus! Ocean's wisdom comes from knowing many ships and many fishes, many storms and many waves!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread." ... If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls were expanded.
We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."
It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.”

— Dorothy Day

“If wishes were fishes, even beggars would eat”

— Lili St. Crow

“Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.”

— Pericles

“I have seen one shrike occupy himself for hours in sticking up on thorns, a number of small fishes that the fishermen had thrown on the shore. The fishes dried up and decayed.”

— John Bachman

“How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spread his claws, And welcome little fishes in With gently smiling jaws!”

— Lewis Carroll

“Fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred”

— Charles Dickens

“Crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever. It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to”

— Charles Dickens

“Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.”

— John Muir

“MS's love For you: it Sleeps With the Fishes”

— John Green

“Fishes should not be taken from the deep; instruments for the profit of a state should not be shown to the people.”

— Lao Tzu

“Trust in God for great things. With your five loaves and two fishes He will show you a way to feed thousands.”

— Horace Bushnell

“Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me”

— Hoyt Axton

“I thought of my often-dream where Time poured the fishes into the sky and the sky was full of star fish; stella maris of the upper air.”

— Jeanette Winterson

“I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.”

— Rose Macaulay

“God quickened in the Sea and in the Rivers, So many fishes of so many features, That in the waters we may see all Creatures; Even all that on the earth is to be found,! As if the world were in deep waters drowned.”

— Guillaume De Salluste Du Bartas

“Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent, Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and why you ask? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.”

— Thomas Bastard

“I transmit astral plane harmonies through my brushes into the physical plane. These otherworld colours are reflected in the alphabet of nature, a grammar in which the symbols are plants, animals, birds, fishes, earth and sky. I am merely a channel for the spirit to utilize, and it is needed by a spirit starved society.”

— Norval Morrisseau

“Show me a man who fishes in winter, and I'll show you a fanatic. Actually, I'll get the better of the deal, because for sheer spectacle a fanatic doesn't hold a candle to a man who fishes in winter”

— Patrick F. McManus

“If you want to nourish a bird, you should let it live any way it chooses. Creatures differ because they have different likes and dislikes. Therefore the sages never require the same ability from all creatures ... concepts of right should be founded on what is suitable. The true saint leaves wisdom to the ants, takes a cue from the fishes, and leaves willfulness to the sheep.”

— Zhuangzi

“On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin'-fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer; China 'crost the Bay!”

— Rudyard Kipling

“The sky and the earth and the waters and the things that are in them, the fishes, and the birds and the trees are not evil. All these are good; it is evil men who make this evil world.”

— Saint Augustine

“One morning I was reading the story of Jesus' feeding of the five thousand. The disciples could find only five loaves of bread and two fishes. 'Let me have them,' said Jesus. He asked for all. He took them, said the blessing, and broke them before He gave them out. I remembered what a chapel speaker ... had said: 'If my life is broken when given to Jesus, it is because pieces will feed a multitude, while a loaf will satisfy only a little lad.'”

— Elisabeth Elliot

“I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage ... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

“We are too feeble and sluggish to make our way out to the upper limit of the air. If someone could reach the summit, or put on wings and fly aloft, when he put up his head he would see the world above, just as fishes see our world when they put up their heads out of the sea; and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the true heaven ...”

— Plato

“Fishes do not roar; they cannot express any sound of suffering; and therefore the angler chooses to think they do not suffer, more than it is convenient for him to fancy. Now it is a poor sport that depends for its existence on the want of a voice in the sufferer, and of imagination in the sportsman.”

— Leigh Hunt

“Unlike the Concord, the Merrimack is not a dead but a living stream, though it has less life within its waters and on its banks. It has a swift current, and, in this part of its course, a clayey bottom, almost no weeds, and comparatively few fishes.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Instead of the scream of a fish hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine, arousing a country to its progress.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“Longer than there've been fishes in the ocean, higher than any bird ever flew, longer than there've been stars up in the heavens, I've been in love with you.”

— Dan Fogelberg