Grasshoppers

Grasshoppers are insects of the suborder Caelifera in the order Orthoptera, noted for their stout bodies and powerful legs with which they are able to jump great distances.

A grasshopper

Quotes

• If you wish you can tell about the locust (as well). Allah gave it two red eves, lighted for them two moon -- like pupils, made for it small ears, opened for it a suitable mouth and gave it keen sense, gave it two teeth to cut with and two sickle-like feet to grip with. The Farmers are afraid of it in the matter of crops since they cannot drive it away even though they may join together. The locust attacks the fields and satisfies its desires (of hunger) from them although its body is not equal to a thin finger.
  • Ali,Nahj ul-Balagha,Sermon 184.

• Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

• Fry: It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. Also he got a race car. Is any of this getting through to you?
  • J. Stewart Burns, "My Three Suns", Futurama (May 4, 1999).

• Twere better far
  That gods should quaff their nectar merrily,
  And men sing out the day like grasshoppers,
  So may they haply lull the watchful thunder.
  • Hartley Coleridge, Poems (1851), "Prometheus".

• Chiefs who no more in bloody fights engage,
  But wise through time, and narrative with age,
  In summer-days like grasshoppers rejoice —
  A bloodless race, that send a feeble voice.
  • Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer (1715-1720), Book III, line 199.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922)

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 336.

• Happy insect! what can be
  In happiness compared to thee?
  Fed with nourishment divine,
  The dewy morning's gentle wine!
  Nature waits upon thee still,
  And thy verdant cup does fill;
  'Tis fill'd wherever thou dost tread,
  Nature's self's thy Ganymede.
  • Abraham Cowley, Anacreontigues, No. 10. Grasshopper.

• Green little vaulter, in the sunny grass,
  Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
  Sole noise that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
  When ev"n the bees lag at the summoning brass.
  • Leigh Hunt, To the Grasshopper and the Cricket.

• When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
  And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
  From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
  That is the grasshopper's — he takes the lead
  In summer luxury — he has never done
  With his delights, for when tired out with fun,
  He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
  • John Keats, On the Grasshopper and Cricket.