A garland of quotations XXI

Culled from the finest "Babar-ians" in literary history, and re-woven every Monday

A Sulaiman (possessed of pomp)—fell at the ant’s foot;
Verily, the gnat displayed force against the elephant.
•Nizami Ganjavi, The Sikandar náma,e bara, or Book of Alexander the Great (1194).

Be wise in time; reflect; repent; and avert the thunder of our vengeance, which is yet suspended over thy head. Thou art no more than a pismire; why wilt thou seek to provoke the elephants? Alas! they will trample thee under thy feet.
•Timur, letter to Sultan Bayezid, c. 1400.

Woe be those, who, in teaching the elephant to direct his trunk against their foes, forget that by a sudden convolution of that trunk, he may rend the driver from his back, and trample him under his feet into the mire.
•Charles Matthew Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

A wealthy man’s undertakings
Are elephant fights witnessed from a hill.
•Thiruvalluvar, Tirukkural (undateable).

Is everyone but me going mad? Over 40th street, an elephant was drifting.
•Alan Moore, Watchmen (1987).

Have you ever asked yourself why no animal in our time grows bigger than an elephant? You’ll find the same mystery on the history of art and in the strange relationships of peoples, cultures, and epochs.
•Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities II (1932).

An expert once told me that in a circus a whole day is spent cleaning and smartening up the elephant, a naturally messy and disorderly animal, so that in the evening it looks like the elephants previously seen at the cinema or in photographs.
•Umberto Eco, “Going to the Same Place” (2001).

As a little white snake
with lovely stripes on its young body
troubles the jungle elephant

      this slip of a girl
      her teeth like sprouts of new rice
      her wrists stacked with bangles

      troubles me.
•Catti Nâtanâr, Ettuthokai, Kuruntokai 119 (C1–3).

The Elephant is seldom in love, they say, for, as I have remarked earlier on, it is sober.
•Aelian, De Natura Animalium X (C3).

I observed this to him [Byron] one day, and added, that I thought his mind had been too great to descend to such trifles! he laughed, and said with mock gravity, “Don’t you know that the trunk of an elephant, which can lift the most ponderous weights, disdains not to take up the most minute? This is the case with my great mind, (laughing anew,) and you must allow the simile is worthy the subject.”
•Marguerite Blessington, Conversations of Lord Byron with the Countess of Blessington (1834).

Night
with its garland of stars
is not for sleeping
The wise sit through it awake
Better an elephant
on the battlefield trample me
than I fall into
hostile hands
•Sona Potiriyaputta, Theragatha (coll. C1 BC).

Someone arrived with an accordion and struck up as dance for the elephants
I am the meteor which plummets from the nipples of the moon
•Richard Huelsenbeck, “The Cylinder Gable” (1916).

Elephantitis [of the leg]…does not appear to be particularly painful, but it must be more uncomfortable to lug about than a wooden leg. Oxford bags would be excusable if worn by one so afflicted. We can think of no equally good excuse.
•Charles A. Johnson, The Log of a Circumnavigator: Being a Series of Informal Narratives Descriptive of a Trip around the World (1927).

Sources: Nizami: trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke (W.H. Allen, 1881); Timur: quoted in Gibbon, Decline and Fall VI (1789); Thiruvalluvar: trans. P. S. Sundaram, The Kural (Penguin, 1991); Musil: trans. Sophie Wilkins (Vintage, 1996); Eco: Chronicles of a Liquid Society (HMH, 2017); Catti: A.K. Ramanujan, ed., Poems of Love and War from the Eight Anthologies and the Ten Long Poems of Classical Tamil (Oxford UP, 2006); Aelian: trans. A.F. Scholfield, On the Characteristics of Animals II (Loeb) (Harvard UP, 1971); Sona: Andres Schelling, ed., Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha. (Shambhala, 1996); Huelsenbeck: trans. Malcolm Green, Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka! (Atlas, 1995); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.