Top 100 Quotes About Elephants
#1. You know ... they say an elephant never forgets.
What they don't tell you is, you never forget an elephant.
Bill Murray
#2. Our elders say that an elephant does not find its own trunk heavy.
Zakes Mda
#3. Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.
Gautama Buddha
#4. What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen.
Jodi Picoult
#5. We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
Graydon Carter
#7. What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can't. And
Jodi Picoult
#8. You ever watch animal planet? Women are kind of like a herd of elephants. They stick together for protection. And if one sense danger? They all stampede.
Emma Chase
#9. So slowly the hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
D.H. Lawrence
#10. We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.
Aimee Bender
#11. When the bull's-eye becomes as big in your mind as an elephant, you are sure to hit it.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#12. Genies rarely have nightmares, for the same reason that elephants don't usually worry about being trampled underfoot. With the possible exception of bottles, there's nothing in the cosmos large enough or malicious enough to frighten them, or stupid enough to try.
Tom Holt
#13. When I look up, I'm surprised to find myself in front of the old building. My feet must have gone on autopilot. I'm like one of those African elephants that finds her way home, no matter how far she's roamed.
Meg Medina
#14. If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense.
Lyall Watson
#15. The whole new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. We have a whole bunch of elephants running around in donkey's clothes.
Robert Novak
#16. No Child Left Behind ... is a giraffe with an elephant's body ... You can't take the vision of Ted Kennedy and merge it to the public policy of George Bush and come out with anything that works.
Steve Rauschenberger
#17. At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen. Peacocks preen, elephants remember, camels go for days without water, and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.
Tom Robbins
#18. I have not seen any Christian sparrow or Muslim lion or Jewish elephant! Animals are lucky as they have not yet invented the religion!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#20. Mkhaya's herd is a good-sized group - sixteen in all, counting the calves - and even though they are the largest land mammals on earth, they are not always easy to find. Elephants, it runs out, are surprisingly stealthy.
Thomas French
#21. Everything that I love is behind those gates. We have elephants, and giraffes, and crocodiles, and every kind of tigers and lions. And - and we have bus loads of kids, who don't get to see those things. They come up sick children, and enjoy it.
Michael Jackson
#22. The Internet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhoea - massive, difficult to re-direct, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.
Gene Spafford
#25. And as the worms pant for your bones,
I would so like to tell you
that this happens to bears and elephants
Charles Bukowski
#26. Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage.
Henry David Thoreau
#27. Employers ganging up against workers is like raising an army of elephants against ants.
Mahatma Gandhi
#28. Man is a distance runner as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of years of chasing antelopes, horses, elephants, wild cattle, and deer.
Paul Shepard
#30. At the meeting of our lips, peacocks went into hiding, elephants suffered memory loss, camels developed a maddening thirst, and dinosaurs long thought to be extinct turned up on the evening news.
Tom Robbins
#31. The elephant is never won by anger; nor must that man who would reclaim a lion take him by the teeth.
John Dryden
#32. Elephants love reunions. They recognize one another after years and years of separation and greet each other with wild, boisterous joy. There's bellowing and trumpeting, ear flapping and rubbing. Trunks entwine.
Jennifer Richard Jacobson
#33. Amid attempts to protect elephants from ivory poachers and dolphins from tuna nets, the rights of children go remarkably unremarked.
Anna Quindlen
#34. I had a probing mind and an elephant memory.
Ethel Waters
#35. An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#36. Took myself to Byculla. The area around the elephants is very soothing. I wish I were an elephant. I would be so composed.
Jerry Pinto
#37. Were we to be engaged in a war . . we should become absolutely destitute of elephants. . .What would our children do without elephants to amuse them? What would the sick do without the sight of elephants to invigorate them?
Paul Chambers
#38. I can give or take elephants; I never can find the cheetah-but the zebras captivate me. They'd be one of the few things that would fit if we were lucky enough to live in a world that's black or white.
Jodi Picoult
#39. Elephants can sense danger. They're able to detect an approaching tsunami or earthquake before it hits. Unfortunately, Jack did not have this talent. The day his life was turned completely upside down, he was caught unaware.
Jennifer Richard Jacobson
#41. The shrewd hunt foxes,
the strong hunt lions,
but the mighty hunt elephants.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#42. I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother.
Will Rogers
#43. Morels are ugly in the skillet. The caps look like the scrotums of leprechauns, the stems like the tusks of fetal elephants.
Tom Robbins
#44. Once there was an elephant Who tried to use the telephant. No! no! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone. Dear me, I am not certain quite That even now I've got it right.
Laura E. Richards
#45. When you hear the elephant music you're hearing what they mean to make.
Dave Soldier
#46. Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants.
Michael Lewis
#47. Noah's wife, who said to Noah, Don't let the elephants watch the rabbits. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#48. I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me.
Noel Coward
#49. I've always thought elephants walk as if they have music being piped into their heads that no one else can hear. And from the roll of their hips and their swagger, I'm going to guess that the artist is Barry White.
Jodi Picoult
#50. Do you know what it means to be that beautiful & still hunted & still alive?
Who knows this story but the elephants & the trees?
Who says the grace of a black man in motion is not perfect
as a tusk in the sun or a single leaf taking its sweet time to the ground?
Danez Smith
#51. Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#52. We have all seen these circus elephants complete with tusks, ivory in their head and thick skins, who move around the circus ring and grab the tail of the elephant ahead of them.
John F. Kennedy
#53. His eyes narrowed. "Is this where the elephants come in? Because there was something about elephants in that French book.
J. Kathleen Cheney
#54. To achieve this density of a neutron star at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#55. Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people.
Richard Leakey
#56. And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.
Ted Hughes
#57. In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There
Frans De Waal
#58. What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?
Roman Jakobson
#59. I went to University in 1991, and I remember, nobody thought of India. I remember conversations where people would laugh and say, "Do you have elephants on the road?" Nobody is saying that today.
Rahul Gandhi
#60. You can eat an elephant one bit at a time.
Mary Kay Ash
#61. My biggest influence growing up was Mad magazine, which is a very text-heavy form of visual satire. I didn't grow up wanting to draw donkeys and elephants with the names of politicians written across them.
Tom Tomorrow
#62. At independence, Tanzania had 350,000 elephants ... in 1987, there were only 55,000 elephants left.
Jakaya Kikwete
#63. The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; his legs are legs for necessity, not for flexure.
William Shakespeare
#64. My biggest concern and main engagement with UNEP is focused on endangered species and illegal wildlife trade - mostly elephants, rhinos, etc.
Yaya Toure
#65. We are responsible for the problem and we must be held responsible for the solution. It will indeed be a sad indictment on our species if rhinos and elephants are no more. And that day will come much sooner than we think if we do not take action.
Brian Connell
#66. The illegal wildlife trade threatens not only the survival of entire species, such as elephants and rhinos, but also the livelihoods and, often, the very lives of millions of people across Africa who depend on tourism for a living.
Yaya Toure
#68. You are being suffocated by tradition ... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art
it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. Nothing is more important than saving ... the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.
James Lee
#70. Always be fearless. Walk like lion, talk like pigeons, live like elephants and love like an infant child.
Santosh Kalwar
#71. It's the old elephant hunter joke, where a guy asserts he's the local elephant hunter, you respond that there aren't any elephants around there, and he, of course, says 'Yeah, see how good I am?
Ryk E. Spoor
#72. I know my Republican friends were glad to see my wife feeding an elephant in India. She gave him sugar and nuts. But of course the elephant wasn't satisfied.
John F. Kennedy
#73. The elephant which supports the world is called Muha-pudma, and the the tortoise which supports the elephant is called Chukwa. In some of the Eastern mythologies we are told that the world stands on the backs of eight elephants, called Achtequed-jams.
E. Cobham Brewer
#74. I didn't feel the tusk go through me. But I did feel this sort of freight elevator coming down, popping the chicken bones, you know. It blinded me. Everything was black. It was bright noon day sun. You mustn't get walked on by elephants.
Peter Beard
#75. Some people have family crests, lions, tigers, unicorns, elephants - a whole menagerie - and if my family had a crest, you know what would be on it? A blintze. I mean it. All the good things in my life are measured in blintzes because by us it's not a party if there isn't a blintze ...
Gertrude Berg
#76. What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.
Eero Saarinen
#77. Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
John Muir
#78. Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.
Wyndham Lewis
#79. Servants ran to wake the young king, Tamar, already awake and watching from his balcony. Curious, naturally. Not altogether pleased. No more than anyone would be, jolted out of a sound sleep by unexpected elephants.
Lloyd Alexander
#80. We ... we could be friends.'
We COULD be rare specimens of an exotic breed of dancing African elephants, but we're not. At least, I'M not.
Neil Gaiman
#81. Not every ant which stays under the elephant's foot dies; the most powerful cannot always kill the weakest!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. You do right by me, I'll show you a life most suckers can't even dream of.
Sara Gruen
#83. He calls it speleogenesis by elephants - the creation of a cave by elephants.
Richard Preston
#84. The knife flaying the elephant does not have to be large, only sharp!
Andre Norton
#85. Do not carry with you your mistakes. Do not carry your cares. Travel on alone. Like an elephant in the forest.
Gautama Buddha
#86. Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
Peter Senge
#87. Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.
Bobby Knight
#88. Whales, like elephants, are so social and intelligent. This hurts me to think of them being transported, put in noisy airplanes, and brought to a horrible concrete pen when they're supposed to be out in the sea.
Jane Goodall
#89. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#90. I have the feeling that I've seen everything, but failed to notice the elephants.
Anton Chekhov
#91. So geographers, in Africa maps, With savage pictures fill their gaps, And o'er uninhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns
Jonathan Swift
#92. Life after death is the elephant in the living room, the one that we are not supposed to notice.
Dinesh D'Souza
#93. Gainst him, a mighty warrior too. Strong, as a soldier born and bred, - Great, as a king whom regions dread. See! what a host the conqueror leads, With elephants, and cars, and steeds. O'er countless bands his pennons fly; So is he mightier far than I.
Valmiki
#95. In fact, the name 'rook' derives from ruhk, the Persian word for chariot. Pawns were footsoldiers, bishops were elephants, knights were mounted cavalry, and speeding along at the edges of the board were the swift and deadly chariots.
Matthew Reilly
#96. Elephants are living treasures. Nature's gardeners. Nature's great teachers. Tragically some people don't give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. The ivory. We must challenge this so-called 'trade' with all our might and shame on those who would condone it.
Virginia McKenna
#97. We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge.
K.A. Applegate
#98. The circus a place where horses, ponies and elephants are permitted to see men, women and children acting the fool.
Ambrose Bierce
#99. It's more like he was an ant in the land of elephants. Nobody would notice his presence, no matter how much noise he might make.
B. Barmanbek
#100. I worked next to an elephant. And considering that she could step on your toes, it's a good idea to keep a certain distance. It's also a good idea to befriend the trainer.
Christoph Waltz
