If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive. – American Quaker Saying
Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy. – Mark Twain
We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics. – Bill Vaughan
Cockroaches really put my “all creatures great and small” creed to the test. – Terri Guillemets
The mosquito is the state bird of New Jersey. – Andy Warhol
Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar. – Bradley Millar
Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness. – John Muir, 1867 October 9th, A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf
Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long glinting dragon-flies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies. – Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company
And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture. – Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Hesperus, or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography,
We starve the rats, creosote the ticks, swat the flies, step on the cockroaches and poison the scales. Yet when these pests appear in human form we go paralytic. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Two-legged creatures we are supposed to love as we love ourselves. The four-legged, also, can come to seem pretty important. But six legs are too many from the human standpoint. – Joseph W. Krutch
Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede I have ever seen? And here is my good big centipede! If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race. – William S. Burroughs
His Labor is a Chant — his Idleness — a Tune — oh, for a Bees experience of Clovers, and of Noon! – Emily Dickinson
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? – George Eliot
People who get through life dependent on other peoples possessions are always the first to lecture you on how little possessions count. – Ben Elton
Butterflies… not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures. – Elizabeth Goudge
Long after the bomb falls and you and your good deeds are gone, cockroaches will still be here, prowling the streets like armored cars. – Tama Janowitz
That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction. – D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat – Don Marquis
Some primal termite knocked on wood; and tasted it, and found it good. That is why your Cousin May fell through the parlor floor today. – Ogden Nash
