Elephants

Our lord the Elephant,
Chief of the ways of God

The elephant is the largest living land animal.

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.
  • Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant

• 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.
  • Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories: The Elephant's Child

• 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

• Elephants don’t know anything about the world of ants; the peaks of mountains are oblivious of what is happening on the plains!
  • Mehmet ildan, Antiquary Arago's Diary, Novel, 1st ed. August (2005), p. 148.

• 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?
  • George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

• 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

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!

other quotes

• Keep five yards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a wicked man cannot be measured _Indian Proverb quotes
• Though your enemy is the size of an ant, regard him as an elephant. _Danish Proverb quotes
• When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog will kick him. _Hindu Proverb quotes
• It is easier to restrain wild donkeys (Democrats) than to raise a dead elephant (Republicans)_Arthur Hoff
• When you have got an elephant by the hind legs and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run_Abraham Lincoln
• Not every ant which stays under the elephant's foot dies; the most powerful cannot always kill the weakest!_Mehmet ildan
• Women and elephants never forget an injury_H. H. Munro quotes

Unsourced/Anonymous

• The Concorde proved to be a white elephant.

• Whatever you do, don't think of the elephant!

External links

music and lyrics, retrieved February 24, 2008