"Ant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respectable and uneventful as that of a reformed roue. In fact there is practically no more history for Weymouth. There are certainly no more raids upon merry-makers; no more calls from the cricket colony which had sung all summer on the banks of the river to the ant colony which had providently toiled on the shore of the bay; no more experimental governments; no more scandal. The men and women of the next five generations were a poor, hard-working race, rising early and toiling ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... stature before the vastness of the mechanical contrivances they had invented. Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini; would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper in slavery. Whichever won, tyranny from above, or spontaneous organization from below, there ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... Mammoth cave,— Some species of the Ant, Have only a trace where eyes should be, Yet never ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... not going to poison the air long, for already it was covered with something red, and a long red line extended from it right away into the jungle. Each tiny red object was an ant, and from experience I knew that very soon every particle of flesh ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... Thus there existed beneath the county of Stirling a vast tract, full of burrows, tunnels, bored with caves, and perforated with shafts, a subterranean labyrinth, which might be compared to an enormous ant-hill. ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... several stories, and the upper portion is treated either with an octagonal lantern or with diminishing stages, and sometimes with a spire. Of the latter class the best example is that of S.Biagio, at Montepulciano,—one of the two designed to flank the faade of Ant. da S.Gallo's beautiful church of that name. One or two good late examples are to be found at Naples. Of the more massive square type there are examples in the towers of S.Michele, Venice; of the cathedral ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... raising of an entire skyscraper—in reality so small that from this height it was difficult to pick out the biggest one through the telescope? What mattered a bridge across the Hudson that was really less than the footprint of an ant at this height? ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks
... the bishop returned, with mournful resignation. "But how have modern inventions added to the beauty or the dignity of human life? Man is mastered and slain by his own inventions, and a skyscraper reduces him to the proportions of an ant." ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... little house or saloko in the rice-fields, and who protects the growing crops. Offerings are made to him, when a new field is constructed, when the rice is transplanted, and at harvest time. "The ground which grows" (that is the nest of the white ant) is said to be ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... beggar's rags—died in a hovel!' I muttered with rage as the equipages and coarse splendours of the West End rolled insolently by. 'Died in a hovel!—and this London, this vast, ridiculous, swarming human ant-hill, whose millions of paltry humdrum lives were not worth one breath from those lips—this London spurned her, left her to perish alone in her squalor ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... for when it is not a continuous scissor-grinding noise, it is like the cry of a corncrake with a weak throat; but what delight there is in it! and how it expresses that joy in the present and recklessness of the morrow, which the fabulist has in vain contrasted with the virtuous industry of the ant in order to point a moral for mankind!—vainly, because the cigale's short life in the sunlit trees will ever seem to men a more ideal one than that of the earth-burrowing ant, with its possible longevity, its peevish parsimony, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Professor William McDougall, has done much to convince the thinking world that all of the social sciences and technologies must be grounded upon an adequate genetic psychology—a genetic psychology which shall take as full and intelligent account of behavior as of experience; of the life of the ant, monkey, ape as of that of man; of the savage as of civilized man; of the infant, child, adolescent as of the adult; of the moron, imbecile, idiot, insane, as of the normal individual; of social groups as of isolated selves. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... broad coach-road; and down it he strode, running at times, past the roaring cataract, past the enormous cliffs of the Carnedds, past Tin-y-maes, where nothing was stirring but a barking dog; on through the sleeping streets of Bethesda, past the black stairs of the Penrhyn quarry. The huge clicking ant-heap was silent now, save for the roar of Ogwen, as he swirled and bubbled down, rich coffee-brown ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... a real river greeted the gaze of our travellers, and, by the enormous ant-hills seen in its vicinity, the doctor recognized the Benoue, one of the great tributaries of the Niger, the one which the natives have called "The ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... scattered over the world like ant-hills: Every one of them is full of trouble and toil, And their makers run to ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... the fear which the harsh shriek of the peacock awakens; or with Pliny, 'panthera' from [Greek: pan thaerion], because properties of all beasts meet in the panther; or persuade themselves that 'formica,' the ant, is 'ferens micas,' the grain-bearer. Medieval suggestions abound, as vain, and if possible, vainer still. Thus Sirens, as Chaucer assures us, are 'serenes' being fair-weather creatures only to be seen in a calm. [Footnote: Romaunt ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... does not concern us, for this reason—men with a narrow horizon and no wings must accept all apparent disproportions between cause and effect. A railway collision has other results besides wrecking an ant-hill, but the wise ants do not pursue these in the Insurance Reports. So it only concerns us that the destruction of the schooner led in time to a lovers' difference between Ruby and young Zeb—two young people of no eminence outside of these pages. And, as a matter of fact, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... would point out that if life is crowned by its success and devotion in industrial organization and ingenuity, we had better worship the ant and the bee (as moralists urge us to do in our childhood), and humble ourselves before the arrogance ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... the only example in Ceylon is the scaly ant-eater, called by the Singhalese, Caballaya, but usually known by its Malay name of Pengolin[1], a word indicative of its faculty, when alarmed, of "rolling itself up" into a compact ball, by bending its head towards its stomach, arching its back into a ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... let the water run away, and many of them keep their old names, but these are the only relics of the old days. The land is not, and never was, very valuable. The roads are wide, and on either side have wide waste strips cut up roughly by horse tracks, cart ruts and ant hills. Bracken, gorse, rushes, thistles and brambles grow there, and you may find many fine blackberries in September. The coarse Aira grass is found with its leaves as rough as files. The villages are often built round greens ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... really burning!" cried the bunny. Then he heard a little ant boy, who was crawling on the ground, ...
— Uncle Wiggily in the Woods • Howard R. Garis
... brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, of AEschylus, appears, from the few genuine fragments of his writings ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... An ant laden with a grain of corn, which he had acquired with infinite toil, was breasting a current of his fellows, each of whom, as is their etiquette, insisted upon stopping him, feeling him all over, and shaking hands. It occurred to him that an excess of ceremony ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... past noon, all the great shops blazed with light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... Ant vere vas olt Fritz Hartmann? said the German, reproachfully; didst never hear a name as of olt Fritz Hartmann from ter ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... or "cusps;" and the animal was doubtless insectivorous. By Professor Owen, the highest living authority on the subject, Amphitherium is believed to be a small Marsupial, most nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal; and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... map of East London, with its coloured lines showing the swarms of human beings who live ignobly and die obscurely, and realise for yourself of what import the cult of beautiful form is to these human ant-heaps. Walk down the populous Whitechapel Road of a Saturday night, or traverse the long slimy alleys of Rotherhithe among the timber wharves, and discover how many of your countrymen and contemporaries are living neither in your country nor in your century. To Mr. Henry James, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... try to imitate them. We say, with a full consciousness of the responsibility which the avowal entails on us, that they do right. It is well in any art to watch and imitate the man who has best succeeded in it. The sluggard has been exhorted even to imitate the ant, and anyone who wishes to ride or drive well, or dress appropriately, or entertain in a country house, ought to study the way the English do these things, and follow their example, for anything worth doing ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... who will say I am bound to wait for this justice, and submit to being plundered in the first instance, if I have myself the means and spirit to protect my own property? But if an affront is offered to me, submission under which is to tarnish my character for ever with men of honour, ant for which the twelve judges of England, with the Chancellor to boot, can afford me no redress, by what rule of law or reason am I to be deterred from protecting what ought to be, and is, so infinitely dearer to every man of honour than his whole fortune? Of the religious views of the matter ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... new order the earth will be transformed into a swarming ant-hill of thickly crowded inhabitants, that complete control over the elemental forces will lead to a destruction of all primitive natural fertility, there is therefore no reason whatever to fear. On the contrary, the more rationally distributed inhabitants will not crowd upon each other ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... his bluster, cannot get away from nature. Don't the winters freeze and kill him? Doesn't water drown him, fire burn him? Love had no place in nature; hatred was a part of the one law, the primal law. The wolf kills the rabbit in hot rage; the black ant tears down the soft-bodied caterpillar not so much ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... weevil is a serious menace to the cotton crop. It is a Central American insect that has become acclimated in Texas and has done great damage. A scientist of the Department of Agriculture has found the weevil at home in Guatemala being kept in check by an ant, which has been brought to our cotton fields for observation. It is hoped that it may ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... though numerous, are not so troublesome or so venomous as in many parts of the torrid zone. The white ant is perhaps as destructive as any other insect, and the greatest precaution hardly preserves one from ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... sir, but the Chinees swarm in the place we're going to. I ant chaffing now; this here's all true—as true as that the chaps all wears a dagger sort of a thing with a crooked handle, and ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... friction between the master and his assistants, which gives so unenviable a record to the relation of Michael Angelo with his pupils.[207] The two inscriptions on the background of the Miracle of the Miser's Heart, read as follows: "S. ANT. DI GIOV DE SE E SUOR[U]": and "[S] DI PIERO E BARTOLOMEO E SU[O]." They have been variously interpreted. Some have suggested that they indicate the names of donors, or that the letter s means sepulchrum, and that they ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... coven-ant, so to speak, to look arter this higher ground 'speshally, and make an Ararat of it for us, ez far ez we could see, we didn't see any reason for SETTLIN' yer," put in a second ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... bending under the weight of the rich nutritious fruit, tall cocoanut-trees with half a ton of ripening nuts in every tuft top, ant-hills nearly as high as native houses, rippling cascades, small rivers winding through the green valleys, tall flamingoes presiding over tiny lakes, and flowers of every hue and shape, together with birds such as one gazes at with curiosity in northern museums, all crowded upon our vision on this ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... cross. Thus pleasing himself awhile, he at last fell into a slumber, and thence into a fast sleep, which detained him in that place until it was almost night; and in his sleep his roll fell out of his hand. Now as he was sleeping, there came one to him, and awaked him, saying, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." And with that Christian suddenly started up, and sped him on his way, and went apace till he came to the ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... advance in groups of four from the donga to the kopje, using the ant-hills as cover when they lay down. Our turn came last, but meanwhile the enemy had received reinforcements, and the nearest ant-hills were nearly all occupied, so that only three men could go at a time. Such a shower of bullets fell that it was ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... the world is what good may I do in it?' There! Like 'None preaches better than the ant, and she ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... supported swimming on sea-monsters whose bodies are partly human? Here I touch on a difficult point; for so great is the force of nature that there is no man who would not choose to be like a man, nor, indeed, any ant that would not be like an ant. But like what man? For how few can pretend to beauty! When I was at Athens, the whole flock of youths afforded scarcely one. You laugh, I see; but what I tell you is the truth. Nay, to us who, after the examples of ancient philosophers, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... bitter that it made me quite ill. Not only that, but one sauba bit my tongue so badly that it swelled up to a great size, and remained like that for several days. The entire genus of the Sauba (Oecodonia cephalotes) ant is typical of tropical South America. The largest Sauba is about an inch long, and possesses powerful scissor-like clippers, with which it can destroy any material, such as leather, cloth, paper or leaves, in a very short time. Their method ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... picking out the details; and she only now and then cast a glance to right or left of her, and never looked back. It did occur to her at last that she herself was like a mere little speck cast away in this ocean of green, toiling over it like an ant over a floor; and she hurried her steps, though she was beginning to be tired. Slowly, slowly she went; half of the breadth of lawn was behind her, and then three quarters; and the building was unfolding at least its external organisation to her curious eyes, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... dreadful ordeals, they were considered as invulnerable, and believed that the arrows of their enemies could no longer harm them."[153] Among the Alur, a tribe inhabiting the south-western region of the upper Nile, to bury a man in an ant-hill and leave him there for a while is the regular treatment ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... could see far down and far up its entire white, thread-like length. The tiny crawling teams each with its puff of dust crawling with it; the great tumbled peaks of the Sierras; the river so far below as to resemble a little stream, the round Cove with its toy houses and its distant ant-like industry—all these were plainly to be seized by a glance of whatever ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... For dawn had just broken and she saw that she was standing in a small open space in the midst of a sandalwood scrub, and encircled by twenty or thirty ferocious-looking myall blacks all armed with spears and waddies. The strong ant-like odour which emanated from their jet-black skins filled her nostrils and, putting her hands to her eyes, she shuddered and fell upon her knees with a ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... away to reconnoitre, but, presently returning, said, "If you will trust yourselves with me I will show you your chance." And then he conducted me to the foot of the stairs leading to our box, which exhibited such a mass of living creatures, that the insects of an ant-hill could scarce ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... right has the ant, in the dust, To cry that the world is all wrong, and unjust, Because the swift foot of a messenger trod Down the home, and the hopes, that were ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... On ant-hills screamed cranes with delight; In their rooms were our wives sighing sore. Our homes they had swept and made tight:— All at once we arrived at the door. The bitter gourds hanging are seen, From branches of chestnut-trees high. Three years ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... after travelling in a S.W. by S. direction, we reached Kikuru. The march lasted for five hours over sun-cracked plains, growing the black jack, and ebony, and dwarf shrubs, above which numerous ant-hills of light chalky-coloured earth appeared ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... herdsmen tending their flocks.[1048] Similarly the Bou-bous, inhabiting the flat grasslands of the French Congo between the Shari and Ubangui Rivers, use the low knolls dotted over their country, probably old ant-hills, as lookout points against raiders.[1049] The sand hills and ridges which border the southern edges of the North German lowland form districts sharply contrasted to the swampy, wooded depressions of the old deserted river valleys just to the north. Early occupied ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... before the Mayor's desk. "Whose widow are you?" asked the Mayor. "Was your husband killed in the riots?—resisting arrest, I suppose." "This is ther widder of Dan Wright," answered the policeman; "an' ef Wilmin'ton had er had a hundred niggers like that, we uns would er had er diff'ant tale ter tell. He was ded game." "Dan Wright," repeated the Mayor slowly. "He's ther darkey that drawed er bead on an' defied we uns ter the las'," said the policeman pushing the woman away, and pushing another up to the desk. But the Mayor neither answered nor looked up. One ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... festive showman, at the conclusion of an epistle—penned under the very shadow of "moral wax statters"—to the Prince of Wales. And there was no evil in such a benevolent expression of feeling. George, the particular party referred to, occupies a prominent position in our national escutcheonry, ant the "Dragoon" is a unique creature always in his company, which it would be wrong to entirely forget. The name of the saint sounds essentially English, and it has been woven into the country's history. The nation is fond of ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... some of the parlor chairs, those that she had loved as a little child; the fox and the stork, the fox and the crow, the ant and the grasshopper, and ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a species of palm. Aeta, a palm of great size; it may reach a hundred feet before the leaves begin. Ai, the three-toed sloth. Albicore, a fish closely related to the tunny. Anhinga, the darter or snake-bird; a cormorant-like bird. Ant-bear, now called the ant-eater. Ara, a macaw. Ara, Scarlet, ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... generously—but it never occurred to her as possible that she should go to see them in their own homes. When we read of a cyclone in China which has killed half a hundred mandarins and a small army of coolies, we realize the sorrow of the survivors no more than we realize the distress of a disturbed ant-hill; and Leam's attitude of mind toward the poor of her native village was precisely the same as ours toward the Chinese killed in a cyclone or the ants murdered in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... Sho confest that quhen shoe wes ane young las of twelf yeiris of age or therby and haid wandereit out of Caithnes quher sho wes borne to Lochquhaber ye cam to Allane McKeldowies wyfe quha wes your ant That she upon ane day being out of the loch in the contrey and returning and being at the Loch syd awaiting quhen the boit sould fetch hir in. That thair cam tua men to her ane cled in blak and the uther with ane grein ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... his arm, smiling to himself. Well, here was Earth beneath him. No longer a green star high in alien skies, but warm soil, new clover so near his face he could see all the little stems and trefoil leaves, moist earth granular at their roots. An ant ran by with waving antennae close beside his cheek. He closed his eyes and drew another deep breath. Better not even look; better to lie here like an animal, absorbing the sun and the feel of ...
— Song in a Minor Key • Catherine Lucille Moore
... published "The Sextuple Alliance," a series of poems on the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte, which afforded considerable promise, and received the commendation of Sir Walter Scott. In 1827, he published "The Ant," a work in two volumes, one of which consists of entirely original, and the other of selected matter. "The Chameleon," a publication of the nature of an annual, commenced in 1831, and extended ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong, a new rank shall be created to receive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... land upon the ball. His home was down at Ocean Spray, near Boston, but he came to us from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was released to the Bostons in the spring of 1888 for the sum of $10,000, and played with that team for several years. He is now in the cigar business in Michigan and is, I ant glad to learn, successful. Pitchers of Clarkson's sort are few and far between, as club managers of ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... Wealth!" the Egyptian cried. His prayer was granted. High as heaven behold Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold. Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet, World-circling traffic roared through mart and street, His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep. Seek Pharaoh's race to-day, and ye shall find Rust and the moth, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... part of the Lynd that we first saw the green-tree ant; which seemed to live in small societies in rude nests between the green leaves ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... demijohn into a pint-pot, his tongue became loosened, and he expressed an opinion that geology was all bosh, and said if he had half his employer's money he'd be dashed if he would go rooting round in the mud like a blessed old ant-eater; he also irreverently referred to his learned boss as "Old Rocks" over there. He had a pretty easy billet of it though, he said, taking it all round, when the weather was fine; he got a couple of notes a week and ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the Australian and Austro-Columbian provinces; but, seeing that not a trace of a Platyrrhine Ape, of a Procyonine Carnivore, of a characteristically South-American Rodent, of a Sloth, an Armadillo, or an Ant-eater has yet been found in Miocene deposits of Arctogaea, I cannot doubt that they already existed in the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... eyes of the Lord,' she murmured. 'I can only see by my own poor bees, but He has every hive, every ant's nest, every leaf, every blade of grass. He lives, He feels, He loves, He suffers, He does good by means of all these. Oh, Monsieur Hennetius, you are right not to pain the Lord, who loves ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... be one of those Brahmas," he said, chuckling. "They carry a whisk broom to brush off any seat they may sit on before they sit down, so's they sha'n't crush an ant, or any other crawling thing. They're vegetarians, too, and won't ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... here; but every day I see the Countess, For I have found the cave your Highness dug With your preceptor Colin in the garden To play at little Robinson. All right! I hide in it. I find it has two openings: This in an ant-heap; that, a bed of nettles. I wait. Your cousin brings her sketch-book, and There in the shadow of the Roman thingummies, She on her camp-stool, I amid the mud, She looking like an English tourist sketching, I whispering ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... the ridge-pole of the world? The great Sun comes round again. It travels over the tops of seas and mountains. Microbes in their dewdrops, seeds in their winds, stars in their courses, worms in their apples, answer it, and the hordes of the ants in their ant-hills run before it. And what does it matter after all, under the great Dome, a few hordes of factmongers more or less, glimmering and wonderless, crawlers on the bottom of the sea of time, lovers of the ooze of knowledge, feeling with slow, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... says that the publication of Charles Darwin's book was like plowing into an ant-hill. The theologians, rudely awakened from comfort and repose, swarmed out angry, wrathful and confused. The air was charged with challenges; and soggy sermons, books, pamphlets, brochures and reviews, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... is the bugbear of the struggling Norwegian countryman's existence. Like the provident ant, he spends the greater part of the summer in laying up for the winter, and he has not only himself and his family to think of, but also his cattle, for if the latter cannot be properly housed and fed he will be ruined. There are times, however, when he contrives ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... for the necessary means of livelihood is by nature instilled into man, and this solicitude even other animals share with man: wherefore it is written (Prov. 6:6, 8): "Go to the ant, O sluggard, and consider her ways . . . she provideth her meat for herself in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest." But every command issued against the inclination of nature is an unjust command, forasmuch as it is contrary to the law of nature. Therefore it seems ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... stop-gap, writer of notes, runner of errands, nursery governess or companion. She called to mind several elderly women of her acquaintance, pensioners of her own group, who still wore its livery, struck its attitudes and chattered its jargon, but had long since been ruthlessly relegated to these slave-ant offices. Never in the world would she ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... speech, and he brought his spear and his head-ax which was as big as half the sky. Kanag would not throw first, for he wanted to prove himself brave, so Gawigawen took aim and threw his head-ax at the boy. Now Kanag used magical power, so that he became an ant and was not hit by the weapon. Gawigawen laughed loudly when he looked around and could not see the boy, for he thought that he had been killed. Soon, however, Kanag reappeared, standing on the head-ax, and Gawigawen, more furious than ever, threw his spear. ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... Ant. Wood possessed the figure of six, which, however, is now not to be found among his books left to the university of Oxford, and deposited in Ashmole's museum. That it once was there, is evident from the MS. catalogue of that ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... approaching army would crush the men, women, and children whose touching fear and helplessness he had just beheld, as a man's foot tramples on an ant-bill, and again every instinct of his being urged him to pray, while from his oppressed heart the imploring cry ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the guests on her fingers the tip of Mrs. Pantin's pink tongue darted in and out with the rapierlike movement of an ant-eater. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... was a red brick structure with long windows. From the joints of its walls the mortar was falling. It lay all around the building in a girdle of gray, like an encircling ant-hill, upon the green lawn. Splendid sugar-maples grew all about the square, in the center of which the court-house stood, and ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the ground, gun poised; Hamil followed her, and they walked across the sandy open where scarcely a tuft of dead grass bristled. It seemed impossible that any living creature bigger than an ant could conceal itself on that bare, arid sand stretch, but the ticked dog was standing rigid, nose pointing almost between his forefeet, and the red dog was backing him, tail like a ramrod, right ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... long way to Lakelands. He lived in a big, roaring town in the Northwest where he owned mills, not little mills with pews and an organ in them, but great, ugly, mountain-like mills that the freight trains crawled around all day like ants around an ant-heap. And now you must be told about Father Abram and the mill that was a church, ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... here no doubt homology comes into play? With respect to this latter case of correlation, I think it can hardly be accidental that the two orders of mammals which are most abnormal in their dermal covering, viz., Cetacea (whales) and Edentata (armadilloes, scaly ant-eaters, etc.), are likewise on the whole the most abnormal in their teeth, but there are so many exceptions to this rule, as Mr. Mivart has remarked, that it has ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... look close to find it. These delays fretted me. 'See, a stone loosed from its bed—he must have passed by here.... That twig is newly snapped; no doubt he caught at it.... Ha, the moss there has been crushed; a foot has gone by. And the ants on that ant-hill, with their eggs in their mouths—a man's tread has frightened them.' So, by some instinctive sense, as if the spirit of my savage ancestors revived within me, I managed to recover the spoor again and again by a miracle, till ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... every country across the sea. He knew, also, the way in which the various nations conducted the business of transport. From his office in Glasgow he could see the whole vast labours of industrious and mercantile man, that Brobdingnagian ant of this revolving globe, merely by closing his eyes. The map of the world's commerce ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... epikleron Lamian ouk eireka soi Tout'; eit' ap' ouchi; kurian tes oikias Kai ton agron kai panton ant' ekeines Echoumen, Apollon, os chalepon chalepotaton Apasi d' argalea 'stin, ouk emoi mono, Tio polu mallon thugatri.—pragm' ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... wayside the lonely grave of some traveller or woodman, marked by its simple fence of twigs, gives a touch of pathos to the forest; and among its natural wonders are the giant ant-hills, often 9 feet ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... have been transformed; the millions of wood-ants, let us say, inhabiting an old and exceedingly populous nest have been transformed into men, but in form only; mentally they are still ants, all silently, everlastingly hurrying by, absorbed in their ant-business. You can almost smell the formic acid. Walking in the street, one of the swarming multitude, you are in but not of it. You are only one with the others in appearance; in mind you are as unlike them as a man is unlike an ant, and the love and sympathy ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... ape-man clambered downward. He felt a hand beneath his foot. He reached down and clutched the figure beneath him and dragged it up among the branches. It struggled weakly and struck at him; but Korak paid no more attention than Tantor to an ant. He lugged his burden to the higher safety and greater comfort of a broad crotch, and there he propped it in a sitting position against the bole of the tree. Numa still was roaring beneath them, doubtless in anger that he had been ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... disowns the paltry rules of dignity, the silly notions of great and mean, by which fashion distorts God's real proportions; is utterly delivered from the spirit of contempt; and, in consulting for the benign administration of life, will learn many a truth, and discharge many ant office, from which lesser beings, esteeming themselves greater, would shrink from as ignoble. But in truth, nothing is degrading which a high and graceful purpose ennobles; and offices the most menial cease to be menial, the moment they are wrought ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... journal, from the date of my last to you from Cadiz, Feb. 29th, 1663/March 10th, 1664 you may be pleased to understand that, March 3/13, the old Governor, D. Ant. Pimentel, returned thither, surprising me with a visit in my house before he would enter into his own, or had any notice of his landing; the cause of his suspension having been only that which I then signified, and as powerfully ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... paintings, the crystals, the draperies, all bathed in gold by the splendor of the dying day, and he felt more than proud to be their possessor. This pride awakened in him an absurd, impossible courage, as though he were a gigantic being from another planet, and all humanity merely an ant hill that he could grind under foot. Just let the enemy come! He could hold his own against the whole lot! . . . Then, when his common sense brought him out of his heroic delirium, he tried to calm himself with an equally illogical optimism. They would not come. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Small walls enclosing family burial plots where newly-dug ground told its own story of the war seemed grim in the moonlight; native huts with their inhabitants standing like spectres before the doors appeared like monstrous ant-heaps—all these were passed, but the drooping eyes of the burghers saw nothing. At midnight another halt was made, horses were off-saddled and men lay down on the veld to sleep. The generals and officers met in Krijgsraad, and other scouts arriving ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... wave the crowd passed over the barrier, and Constans grasped helplessly at half a hundred out-stretched hands. A babel of voices arose; the arena, filled to overflowing with excited men and women, was comparable only to some gigantic ant-hill. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... something terrible: will this convey a rough idea? the scenery all round is really magnificent, and the looking down this black smooth stone-pit is quite fearful; it slopes away so deceitfully, and looks like a huge lion-ant's nest. Few people see this, because you can only get at it by a walk of a mile, but I think it quite as worth seeing as the logan-rock. My next object was the Land's End, where, as elsewhere, I did ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... which cling like ivy to the trunk, and others climbing to the topmost boughs, fall thence in grey silky garlands, or, like the tillandsia, adorn them with hundreds of pink and white flowers; among these, many an ant and bee had fixed his nest, and every thing was teeming ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... harvesting and for mowing. I am fully satisfied that your machines are the best yet offered to the farmers of this State. I have mowed about four hundred acres, a great portion of which was wild prairie, very frequently running against stones and ant heaps with sufficient force to throw both driver and raker off the machine, without injury to the machine. Why your machine is preferable to any other, is, after you have cut your different kinds ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... Violet and her lover grouped by his fading wife's sofa, and school himself, as he best might, to endure the spectacle of their perfect happiness in each other's love, and to know that he—who had planned his future days so wisely, and provided, like the industrious ant, for the winter of his life—had broken down in his scheme of existence, after all, and had no more part in this house which he had deemed his own than a traveller at ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... first time, to take a really serious view of my plan "to see the world." It became evident with startling abruptness, that a man might be both hungry and cold in the midst of abundance. I recalled the fable of the grasshopper who, having wasted the summer hours in singing, was mendicant to the ant. My weeks of careless gayety were over. The money I had spent in travel looked like a noble fortune to me at ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... known to them—our inventions are their common everyday appliances—and on the wings of air and rays of light they hear and know all that goes on in every country. Our wars and politics are no more to them than the wars and politics of ants in ant-hills,—they have passed beyond all trivialities such as these. They have discovered the secret of life's true ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... much troubled with underground insects at work. You have seen a garden covered with ant hills. Here is a remedy, but one of which ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... fully realised. During the whole of that day and the next they were almost continuously engaged in dragging the sledges over masses of ice, some of which rose to thirty feet above the general level. If the reader will try to imagine a very small ant or beetle dragging its property over a newly macadamised road, he will have a faint conception of the nature of the work. To some extent the dogs were a hindrance rather than a help, especially when passing over broken fragments, ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... light there is also shadow. It is not in vain that Adonai our God gave his chosen people the tenacity of a snake, the cunning of a fox, the look of a falcon, the memory of a dog, the diligence of an ant, and the sociability of a beaver. We were in captivity on the rivers of Babylon, and have become powerful! Our temple was destroyed, but we have built a thousand new temples! For eighteen hundreds years we were slaves; now we have grown head and ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... Silvertip, with a last look at the rudder cable. "Ant as kwicker ve leaf dis de'th trap, as better for me. She blow up gale har in turty minutes. Ven Ay ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... surroundings. Game dozed everywhere beneath the scanty shade, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, sometimes in herds. Motionless they stood; and often, were it not for the switch of a tail, they would have remained unobserved. Even the sentinel hartebeestes, posted atop high ant hills on the outskirts of the herds, seemed half asleep. Nevertheless they were awake enough for the job, as was evidenced when the two human figures came too near. Then a snort brought every creature ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... and Thibet the only information which reached Europe during the whole of the seventeenth century was due to the missionaries. Such names as Father Alexandre de Rhodes, Ant. d'Andrada, Avril, Benedict Goes, may not be passed over in silence. In their Annual Letters is to be found a quantity of information, which even in the present day retains a real interest, as concerning ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... but from the quail, the woodcock, the swallow, and a thousand others, that are apparently more generous than the poor ant, to which AEsop has given a reputation for avarice that it will have some trouble to shake off. The birds swallow the seeds, many of which are covered with a hard, horny skin, that often resists digestion; these ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... Cargan, "is the same old bunch. The same lily-livered crowd that I've seen in the streets since I laid the first paving stone under 'em myself in '91. Afraid of them? Hell! I'd walk through an ant hill as scared as I would through that mob. Thanks for telling me, Dan, but Jim Cargan won't be in the mollycoddle class for a century ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... very lightly, Mr. Meredith, of a calamity which destroys an ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the universe think us of more importance than we ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... stream of time several millions of years—to our own geologic age—and we find the earth swarming with the human species like an ant-hill with ants, and with a vast number of forms not found in the Mesozoic era; and the men are doing to a large part of the earth what the ants do to a square rod of its surface. Where did they come from? We cannot, in our day, believe that ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... got to remember that these creatures can't be judged by earthly standards; they probably don't feel pain, and they haven't got what we'd call individuality. Any intelligence they have is the property of the whole community—like an ant-heap. That's it! Ants are willing to die for their ant-hill; so ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred that other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had secured the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... curious sensation, seeing the big wheel from this angle. Much the same sensation as that of an ant, staring at the oncoming wheel of a ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... little hard on them if he has perhaps been a little kind to their predecessor. The lingo is indeed almost always stupendous and occasionally terrible. The printer aids sometimes; for it was not at once that I could emend the description of the B. V. M. as "Mere et Fille de l'aliltonat [ant] plasmateur" into "altitonant" ("loud-thundering"), while plasmateur itself, though perfectly intelligible and legitimate, a favourite with the rhetoriqueurs, and borrowed from them even in Middle Scots, is not exactly everybody's word. But from ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... negress escaped punishment, but the verandah with its appurtenances caught fire, and everything, even the unpacked billiard-table, was burnt to ashes. Still, Madame the Brave never lost heart. She applied herself valiantly as a white ant to repairing her broken home, and, wonderful to relate in this land of no labour, ruled by the maxim "festina lente," all had been restored within six months. We shall dine at her ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... like the situation of our house nearly so much as on the cliffs; we had so little air, and were so much tormented by insects of all kinds. Some of the ant hills were at least three feet high; and upon merely walking near them, the angry little inhabitants came swarming out in multitudes to resent the ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows.' 'Tis 'Th' Darin' Exploits iv a Brave Man be an Actual Eye Witness.' 'Tis 'Th' Account iv th' Desthruction iv Spanish Power in th' Ant Hills,' as it fell fr'm th' lips iv Tiddy Rosenfelt an' was took down be his own hands. Ye see 'twas this way, Hinnissy, as I r-read th' book. Whin Tiddy was blowed up in th' harbor iv Havana he instantly con-cluded they must be war. He debated th' question long an' earnestly ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... what you always say," said the invalid, as he began to toss his head wearily to and fro. "Will she never tell me? It is not like her to keep me in suspense. She was the sweetest, truest, loveliest girl in all the world. When I get well, mother, I ant going to find ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Stanny, in a tone of severe reproof. "Oh, Cousin Caroline, aren't you ashamed to call my grandma an ant! a little ugly black thing, crawling on the ground. She isn't an ant, now! she's ...
— The Little Nightcap Letters. • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... bad. Pa and I talked over our whole life in those three days, telling each other about our young days; Pa telling me about some girls he used to spark that I never woulda heard about if it hadn't been for that blizzard.... I told him about my first husband ... he's the one who left me the ant-tic broach ... we did get ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... inhabitants here, with some good buildings and a fine, broad, stone wharf, but it is rather a dingy place. The steamer "Bonanza" had just landed. On the double row of flaggings leading up to the summit of the bank, were two ant-like processions of Kentucky folk—one, leisurely climbing townward with their bags and bundles, the other hurrying down with theirs to the boat, which was ringing its bell, blowing off steam, and in other ways creating an uproar which seemed to turn the heads ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... and pretended to be interested in a black ant that was crawling rapidly up the wall below him; he was a truthful pussy and preferred to change the subject. The stranger was comfortable and sat ...
— The Book of the Cat • Mabel Humphrey and Elizabeth Fearne Bonsall
... American poet, was there. But the center of them all was Olympia Johns herself—spinster, thirty-four, as small and active and excitedly energetic as an ant trying to get around a match. She had much of the ant's brownness and slimness, too. Her pale hair was always falling from under her fillet of worn black velvet (with the dingy under side of the ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... why, you and another book seller, you does not to imprint some good wooks? There is a reason for that, it is that you cannot to sell its. The actual-liking of the public is depraved they does not read who for to amuse one's self ant but to instruct one's. But the letter's men who cultivate the arts and the sciences they can't to pass without the books. A little learneds are happies enough for to may to satisfy their fancies on the literature. ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... arms, to arms! arm, to arms, arm, to arms, arm":—like the hue-and-cry after wolves; and all diverse tongues, according to their nations; and you saw them come out of their tents and little lodgings, as thick as little ants when you uncover the ant-hills, to bring help to their comrades, who were having their throats cut like sheep. Their cavalry also came from all sides at full gallop, patati, patata, patati, patata, pa, ta, ta, patata pata, ta, eager to be in the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... on a floor, with a roof stretching from the ridge-pole down to the rones of the verandah, bungalow fashion. It stood some feet above the ground on a number of tarred and tin-capped piles, a necessary precaution in the land of the white ant. Some distance away from the station-house the outbuildings stood—the store, the men's quarters, and the like—for Barellan was worth having when fully stocked and properly worked. But now it was languishing for want of an ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... Ant. As the event stamps them; but they have a good cover, they show well outward. The prince and count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleached alley in mine orchard, were thus overheard by a man of mine: The prince discovered to Claudio that he ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... mone stond ant strit, On is bot-forke is burthen he bereth Hit is muche wonder that he na down slyt, For doute leste he valle ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... lost my balance and tumbled backward down the stairs. I don't know how come I didn't hurt myself but the Lord wuz wid me and I got up and flew. I could hear her just hollering 'Come back here! come back here!' but I ant stop fer nothing. That night at supper while I wuz fanning the flies from the table she sed ter the doctor. 'Doctor what you think? I had ter whip that little devil ter day. I sent her after brush broom and she ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... de la religion chrtienne, celui des moeurs, de la vertu, de la saine politique etc. rompre tous les canaux de communication entre la terre et le ciel, bannir, exterminer du monde le Dieu qui le tira du nant, y introduire l'impit la plus complte, la licence la plus consomne, l'anarchie la plus entire, la ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... people she wished to carry to heaven with her would be saved, and all of them, even the meanest, set above her in that place where the first is last and the last first, joy at such tidings would have slain her. She had as little spiritual pride as a ladybird or an ant. Now the new thought had come into her mind that her daughter would be saved; not in her way, nor by her means, but in a way that would at the same time be a rebuke to her spiritual pride, her impatience ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Where I am, ye too shall dwell. I am gone before your face A heart-beat's time, a gray ant's pace. When ye come where I have stepped, Ye will marvel why ye wept; Ye will know, by true love taught, That here is all, and there is naught. Weep awhile, if ye are fain,— Sunshine still must follow rain! Only not at death, for death— Now I see—is that first ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various |
