Dolphins

Though pleased to see the dolphins play,
I mind my compass and my way.

Dolphins are marine mammals that are closely related to whales and porpoises.

Quotes

• For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
  • Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Chapter 23

• Don't any of you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with dolphins and go to live in their salty pastures, and get to like the sounding waves of the sea more than the land, while the dolphins prefer the mountains.
  • Archilochus, Fragments

• I, I wish you could swim
  Like the dolphins
  Like dolphins can swim

  Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
  We can beat them, forever and ever
  Oh, we can be heroes just for one day.

  • David Bowie and Brian Eno, "Heroes", on "Heroes" (1977), used as the "Tunnel song" of the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

• Once I sat upon a promontory,
  And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
  That the rude sea grew civil at her song.
  • William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595), Oberon, Act 2, scene i

• Where, like Arion on the dolphin’s back,
  I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves
  So long as I could see.
  • William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, scene i

• Write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad. Love the dolphins.
  • Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

• And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from the mouth of stone dolphins.
  • Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915), Part One, Ch. I (p. 7)

• Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear
  (The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves).
  • Thomas Sturge Moore, "The Gazelles", line 13; from The Centaur's Booty (London: Duckworth, 1903) p. ix

• Though pleased to see the dolphins play,
  I mind my compass and my way.
  • Matthew Green, The Spleen (1973)