Ape Quotes

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all. (Baltasar Gracián)
Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. View quote
H. L. Mencken
The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us. View quote
Cicero
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. View quote
Desmond Morris
Any ape can reach for a banana, but only a human can reach for the stars or even know what that means. View quote
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Among our neighbors of Central and Southern America, we see the Caucasian mingled with the Indian and the African. They have the forms of free government, because they have copied them. To its benefits they have not attained, because that standard of civilization is above their race. Revolution succeeds Revolution, and the country mourns that some petty chief may triumph, and through a sixty days' government ape the rulers of the earth. View quote
Jefferson Davis
You can do something that walks a line, and invariably, whatever that line is, it will be crossed by people who don't know any better and want to ape the success. View quote
David Fincher
A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links. (Ambrose Bierce)
What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? ... The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel! View quote
Roger Penrose
I mean my characters are more like men than these real men are, see. They're rough and rude, they got hands and they got bellies. They hate and they lust; break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed. View quote
Robert E. Howard
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape. View quote
George Santayana
Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Greatness, in order to gain recognition, must all too often consent to ape greatness. View quote
Jean Rostand
Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape! View quote
Abraham Cowley
The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich. View quote
Publilius Syrus
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss Poems that take a thousand years to die But ape the immortality of this Red label on a little butterfly. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage. View quote
Vladimir Nabokov
Terrorism benefits the Arabs, it may lay waste the Yishuv and shake Zionism. But to follow in the Arabs' footsteps and ape their deeds is to be blind to the gulf between us. Our aims and theirs run counter: methods calculated to further theirs, are ruinous to us. (David Ben-Gurion)
The ape, vilest of beasts, how like to us. View quote
Ennius
Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. View quote
James Branch Cabell
Michael has never cried during a Broadway show. Except in that scene where Tarzan's ape father is brutally murdered. And that was only because he was laughing so hard. View quote
Meg Cabot
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying. View quote
Langston Hughes