Elephants
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Chief of the ways of God
The elephant is the largest living land animal.
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[edit] Sourced
- 群盲評象
- 涅槃経 (Nirvana Sutra)
- Translation: A crowd of blind people evaluate an elephant.
- A metaphor of unenlighted people and their relation to the right knowledge.
- Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant,
The only harmless great thing.- John Donne, The Progress of the Soul, l.381
- The torn boughs trailing o'er the tusks aslant,
The saplings reeling in the path he trod,
Declare his might — our lord the Elephant,
Chief of the ways of God.
- In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant — a new Elephant — an Elephant's Child — who was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.
- His services are like so many white elephants, of which nobody can make use, and yet that drain one's gratitude, if indeed one does not feel bankrupt.
- G. E. Jewbury Letters 1892; this is the earliest known occurrence of "white elephant" in English, though references to Indian and Thai veneration of white elephants go back to at least the early 17th century. [1]
- Women and elephants never forget an injury.
- Saki, Reginald on Besetting Sins
- Usually quoted as Elephants never forget; this is the original according to Dictionary of Proverbs and their Origin, L & R Flavell, Kyle Cathie Ltd. 1994; ISBN 1 85626 141 7, p.88
- Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it?
- Not that I think much depends
On how we treat our feathered friends,
Or hold the wrinkled elephant
A nobler creature than my aunt.
It's simply that I'm sure I can
Get on without my fellow man.- Ogden Nash, Poem: À Bas Ben Adhem
I saw a peanut stand, heard a rubber band,
- I saw a needle that winked its eye.
- But I think I will have seen everything
When I see an elephant fly.
- I saw a front porch swing, heard a diamond ring,
- I saw a polka-dot railroad tie.
- But I think I will have seen everything
when I see an elephant fly.
- I seen a clothes horse, he r'ar up and buck
- And they tell me that a man made a vegetable truck
- I didn't see that, I only heard
But just to be sociable I'll take your word
- I heard a fireside chat, I saw a baseball bat
- And I just laughed till I thought I'd die
- But I'd be done see'n about everything
when I see an elephant fly.
- When I See An Elephant Fly Walt Disney Productions film Dumbo, Music by Oliver Wallace; Lyrics by Ned Washington
- Elephant-ear-witnesses-to-be of hymns
and glorias, these ministrants all gray or
gray with white on legs or trunk, are a pilgrims'pattern of revery not reverence — a
religious procession without any priests,
the centuries-old carefullest unrehearsed
play.- Marianne Moore, "Elephants," from Nevertheless (1944)
- An elephant can trumpet and shake the earth but not the self-possession of the ants who hold it.
- Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, 24 March 1968
[edit] Song: The Elephant by Michael Flanders
- A elephant's life is tedious, laborious and slow;
I've been an elephant all me life so I blooming well ought to know.
- I'm an Introverted, Elephocentric, Hypochondriac,
And I'll stick in the Elephant's nursing home
Till I get me memory back!
- I suffer from Schizophrenia
It comes on me in spells
Sometimes I'm King of Armenia
At others I'm Orson Welles.
I tell them I'm Napoleon
and all that sort of bunk
They never guess that all the time
I'm laughing up me trunk!
[edit] Unsourced/Anonymous
- The Concorde proved to be a white elephant.
- Whatever you do, don't think of the elephant!
