Mice

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and silver eye.

A mouse is a small rodent.

Sourced

• A cube of cheese no larger than a die
  May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.

• But, mousie, thou art no thy lane,
  In proving foresight may be vain:
  The best laid schemes o' mice an' men,
        Gang aft a-gly,
  An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
        For promis'd joy.
  • Robert Burns,To a Mouse, st. 7 (1785).

• A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
  With silver claws and silver eye
  • Walter de la Mare, Silver.

• Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
  • Plautus, Truculentus, Act IV, sc. iv, l. 15.

• When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.
  • Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, Book VIII, Section 103.

• I think if she lived in
  A little shoe-house —
  That little old woman was
  Surely a mouse!
  • Beatrix Potter, The Old Woman.

• The city mouse lives in a house,
  The garden mouse lives in a bower
  • Christina Rossetti, The City Mouse and the Garden Mouse.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 533.

• I holde a mouses herte nat worth a leek.
  That hath but oon hole for to sterte to.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Paraphrase of the Prologue of The Wyves Tale of Bath, line 572.

• The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651); see Plautus, Trunculentus, IV, above.

• It had need to bee
  A wylie mouse that should breed in the cat's eare.
  • John Heywood, Proverbs, Part II, Chapter V.

• "Once on a time there was a mouse," quoth she,
  "Who sick of worldly tears and laughter, grew
  Enamoured of a sainted privacy;
  To all terrestrial things he bade adieu,
  And entered, far from mouse, or cat, or man,
  A thick-walled cheese, the best of Parmesan."
  • Lorenzo Pignotti, The Mouse Turned Hermit.

• The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole
  Can never be a mouse of any soul.
  • Alexander Pope, The Wife of Bath, Her Prologue, line 298.

• The mouse ne'er shunn'd the cat as thev did budge
  From rascals worse than they.
  • William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act I, scene 6, line 44.

Attributed

• If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
  • Desmond Tutu, (quoted in Ending Poverty As We Know It : Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage (2003) by William P. Quigley, p. 8)
• The early bird may catch the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
  • American proverb