Twig Quotes

I do not want to die... until I have faithfully made the most of my talent and cultivated the seed that was placed in me, until the last small twig has grown. (Käthe Kollwitz)
Just as the twig is bent the tree is inclined. View quote
Alexander Pope
I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I don't normally look like a twig and I do eat like a pig but the weight has just dropped off me. View quote
Sienna Miller
We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it. View quote
Laurence Sterne
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream. View quote
Gaston Bachelard
Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders. View quote
Arthur Symons
There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong. View quote
Tecumseh
As the twig is bent the tree inclines. View quote
Virgil
Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves... He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood... His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars. (Jean Arp)
Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: "Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig." View quote
Chinua Achebe
'Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined. View quote
Alexander Pope
I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. And I find, among these works, nothing more noble than the history of our struggle to understand nature-a majestic entity of such vast spatial and temporal scope that she cannot care much for a little mammalian afterthought with a curious evolutionary invention, even if that invention has, for the first time in some four billion years of life on earth, produced recursion as a creature reflects back upon its own production and evolution. Thus, I love nature primarily for the puzzles and intellectual delights that she offers to the first organ capable of such curious contemplation. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Included in this "almost nothing,” as a kind of geological afterthought of the last few million years, is the first development of self-conscious intelligence on this planet-an odd and unpredictable invention of a little twig on the mammalian evolutionary bush. Any definition of this uniqueness, embedded as it is in our possession of language, must involve our ability to frame the world as stories and to transmit these tales to others. If our propensity to grasp nature as story has distorted our perceptions, I shall accept this limit of mentality upon knowledge, for we receive in trade both the joys of literature and the core of our being. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
I was never allowed to play with guns when I was a child. While various friends were able to scamper around the woods with their Johnny Sevens, I had to make do with an old twig. And convincing an eight-year-old he was dead simply because I'd pointed a piece of larch his way was not quite as easy as you might imagine. View quote
Jeremy Clarkson
Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow. View quote
Ted Hughes
Has not the famous political Fable of the Snake, with two Heads and one Body, some useful Instruction contained in it? She was going to a Brook to drink, and in her Way was to pass thro' a Hedge, a Twig of which opposed her direct Course; one Head chose to go on the right side of the Twig, the other on the left, so that time was spent in the Contest, and, before the Decision was completed, the poor Snake died with thirst. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for... with the hope for this little twig. View quote
Miloš Forman
A note to our enemies. You think you know America, but you only see the tiny, inept, incompetent, cowering political tip of a very big, very capable iceberg. You don't know the Heartland where the people are fiercely independent and willing to defend this nation with their bare hands if that's what it takes. You don't know the steel workers in Pittsburgh with muscles that could break a man's neck like a twig. You don't know the swamp folks in Cajun country that can wrestle a full-grown alligator out of the water. You don't know the mountain folks in Appalachia who can knock a squirrel's eye out from a hundred yards away with a small caliber rifle. You don't know the farmers, the cowboys, the loggers and the seagoing folks. You don't know the truck drivers, the carpenters, the mountain men who live off the land, the hard rock miners or the small town cops who keep the peace in the rowdy border towns. No, you don't know America. View quote
Charlie Daniels
First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf. (Martin Luther)
. never in my life I have seen such a truly sad thing [an atmosphere at Wolfheze ]. A mother heartbroken about the loss of her only child is nothing compared to this. A broad streak or strip in front of you, which becomes blacker and blacker towards the horizon. a mysterious ticking and hissing of rain drops which keep hanging halfway the heather plant on each twig and sprout.. View quote
Anton Mauve
In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old. View quote
John C. Hawkes
I am not insensible to natural beauty, but my emotional joys center on the improbable yet sometimes wondrous works of that tiny and accidental evolutionary twig called Homo sapiens. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago. View quote
Steven Pinker