Arthropods

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This page is for quotes about arthropods, (animals of the phylum Arthropoda), both in general and about specific taxa.

[edit] Sourced

• To a good approximation, all species are insects.
  • Robert May^[1]

• Happy the Cicadas live, since they all have voiceless wives.
  • Xenarchus (Grecian poet)^[2]

• The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!
  Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.
  • Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, lines 217-8.

• An inordinate fondness for beetles
  • The (possibly apocryphal) response J. B. S. Haldane gave when asked what could be inferred about the mind of the Creator from the works of Creation. ^[3]

[edit] Unsourced

• Nothing more than a little shrimp-like animal, standing on its head in a limestone house and kicking food into its mouth
  • Louis Agassiz on barnacles

• Don't accept the chauvinistic tradition that labels our era the age of mammals. This is the age of arthropods. They outnumber us by any criterion – by species, by individuals, by prospects for evolutionary continuation.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, 1988

• If we live out our span of life on earth without ever knowing a crab intimately we have missed having a jolly friendship. Life is a little incomplete if we can look back and recall these small people only as supplying the course after soup and with the Chablis. - William Beebe, Nonsuch: Land of Water, 1932

• What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly.
  • Richard Bach

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

• 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

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

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

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

[edit] References