Ant Quotes, Sayings
These ant quotes and sayings teach us many life lessons about strength, inspiration, industriousness, teamwork, resiliency, and achievement.
Even though an ant is just a tiny insect, it has many admirable traits; it toils without self interest, praise, or rest, it puts the survival of the community above all else. And when it’s colony is attacked, it bands together with other ants in cooperative defense.
The following list includes some of the best ant quotes and sayings that reflect many of these virtues and more.
Best ant quotes about strength, inspiration, achievement
Here are ten of our favorite ant quotes from famous authors, philosophers, and scientists.
Top 10 best ant quotes
1.) It would seem that the ant works its way tentatively, and, observing where it fails, tries another place and succeeds.
Richard Jefferies
2.) All good work is done the way ants do things: Little by little.
Lafcadio Hearn
3.) An ant has no quarrel with a boot.
Tom Hiddleston
4.) People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.
Lauren Oliver
5.) The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men.
Auguste Forel
6.) It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
7.) The ant philosophy: Never give up. Look ahead. Stay positive. And do all you can.
Jim Rohn
8.) Courage isn’t always a lion’s roar. It’s also the silence of ants working patiently, persistently, and never giving up.
Unknown
9.) Ants are good citizens: they place group interests first.
Clarence Day
10.) You piece of dirt! No, I’m wrong. You’re lower than dirt. You’re an ant!
Hopper, A Bug’s Life
Ant quotes about life
1.) Life is priceless even to an ant.
Liu Xiaobo
2.) Am I as admirable as that ant?
Nobuyuki Fukumoto
3.) Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.
E. O. Wilson
4.) Ants are a curious race.
Robert Frost
5.) I would like to live a day in the life of an ant and hope not to get squashed.
Kiowa Gordon
6.) Next time you see an ant, remember: winter is coming! The best time to prepare for tomorrow is today.
Haddon W. Robinson
7.) Still we live meanly, like ants … our life is frittered away by detail.
Henry David Thoreau
8.) People, chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging to certainties… they live like ants.
Bela Lugosi
9.) The life of an ant and the life of my child should be accorded equal respect.
Wayne Pacelle
10.) Man steps on an ant when he can’t catch the fly.
Bill Gaede
11.) If all humans disappeared today, the earth would start improving tomorrow. If all the ants disappeared today, the earth would start dying tomorrow.
David Suzuki
12.) So, the ant way of life is very ancient and very successful. As far as human beings are concerned, we’ve been around for only one million years—too soon be sure.
Edward O. Wilson
13.) When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.
E. O. Wilson
See 173 Rabbit Quotes and Captions.
About strength
1.) An ant may well destroy a whole dam.
Chinese proverb
2.) The fiercest serpent may be overcome by a swarm of ants.
Isoroku Yamamoto
3.) The little ant at its hole is full of courage.
African proverb
4.) The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.
Bill Vaughan
5.) For the colony, and for oppressed ants everywhere!
Flik, A Bug’s Life
Check out these inspiring bee quotes and captions.
Inspirational ant quotes
1.) God cuts out our path, makes a groove in the clay with His finger, and we poor blind ants slide down into it.
Maria McCann
2.) I think everybody should study ants. They have an amazing four-part philosophy. Never give up, look ahead, stay positive and do all you can.
Jim Rohn
3.) The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.
Stephen Vincent Benét
4.) An ant is a wise creature for itself, but it is a shrewd thing, in an orchard or garden.
Francis Bacon
5.) The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
6.) If an ant carries an object a hundred times its weight, you can carry burdens many times your size.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Funny ant quotes
1.) I bought an ant farm. I don’t know where I am going to get a tractor that small!
Steven Wright
2.) I wonder what ants do on rainy days?
Haruki Murakami
3.) I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.
David Lynch
4.) It’s only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realize how often they burst into flames.
Harry Hill
5.) If ants are such busy workers, how come they find time to go to all the picnics?
Marie Dressler
6.) If we were created in God’s image, then when God was a child he smushed fire ants with his fingertips and avoided tough questions.
Buddy Wakefield
7.) I love ants. Do they have uncles? Ha Ha!
Elmo
8.) Ant 1: So, uh, do you ever worry that your itsy little neck is just going to snap under the weight of your head?
Ant 2: Stop asking me that. You ask me that, like, every five minutes.
Ant 1: Sometimes I notice my antennae out of the corner of my eye and I’m all, like: AHH! Something is on me! Get it off! Get it off!
Ant 2: Yeah, the antennae again. Listen, I just remembered, I have to go walk around aimlessly now.
Jim Benton
9.) To an ant on the ground, an airplane probably looks like an ant.
Amanda Bynes
10.) We’re all ants. I’m a glittery little ant.
Alanis Morissette
11.) If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.
Bert Holldobler
About intelligence
1.) The ants and the bees are, in many ways, far more intelligent and ingenious; they manage their government with vastly less quarreling, wastefulness and imbecility.
H. L. Mencken
2.) Ants in the house seem to be, not intruders, but the owners.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Ant quotes about love
1.) He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
Ben Hecht
2.) I love them very much. All animals big and small. You can name an ant for instance.
Bindi Irwin
3.) Even Kings and emperors with heaps of wealth and vast dominion cannot compare with an ant filled with the love of God.
Guru Nanak
About following your path
1.) The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.
John Clellon Holmes
2.) Every ant knows the formula of its ant-hill, every bee knows the formula of its beehive. They know it in their own way, not in our way. Only humankind does not know its own formula.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
3.) Ants are a terrific analogy for the route to success. They will go over, under, around, or through whatever gets in their way. They never stop moving, and neither should you. Take the word impossible and turn it into I’m Possible.
Honoree Corder
4.) Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.
Lewis Thomas
5.) How narrow is the vision that exalts the busyness of the ant above the singing of the grasshopper.
Khalil Gibran
Teamwork ant quotes
1.) One bee cannot build a hive; one ant cannot build a colony.
Matshona Dhliwayo
2.) Ants can live together in solidarity and forget themselves in the community. In a normative capitalist society, everyone is an egoist. In the ants’ civilization, you are part of the group; you don’t live for yourself alone.
Bernard Werber
3.) Ants are good citizens; they place group interest first. But they carry it so far, they have few or no political rights. An ant doesn’t have the vote, apparently; he just has his duties.
Clarence Day
4.) What is it about the ant way of life that has stood the test of time so well? All ants belong to extended families, and carry their prey home to share. Unselfishness is the rule. Everything they do is for their colony’s good.
Bill Mason
Ant quotes about hard work and achievement
1.) Ants are not only efficient, they are hard-working and thrifty, qualities which have always seemed like good reasons for seeing them as virtuous role models.
William Morton Wheeler
2.) It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau
3.) We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.
Gerald Brenan
4.) The ant is knowing and wise, but he doesn’t know enough to take a vacation.
Clarence Day
5.) We know of no behavior in ants or any other social insects that can be construed as play.
Bert Holldobler
6.) Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.
E. O. Wilson
7.) All the best work is done the way that ants do things — by tiny but untiring and regular additions.
Lafcadio Hearn
8.) All that I have accomplished … has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.
Elihu Burritt
9.) The tiny ant, a creature of great industry, drags with its mouth whatever it can, and adds it to the heap which she is piling up, not unaware nor careless of the future.
Horace
10.) A harvester ant never quits and she never, ever gives up.
Ladene Mayville
Ant quotes about fighting spirit
1.) The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Ezra Pound
2.) The greatest enemies of ants are other ants, just as the greatest enemies of men are other men.
Auguste Forel
3.) Ants, fighting together, will vanquish the lion.
Saadi
4.) Not all ants use violence to dominate their world, some use more subtle methods.
Edward O. Wilson
5.) Caution is not cowardice; even the ants march armed.
Ugandan proverb
6.) You’ve got a lot of spunk kid, but no one’s gonna help a bunch of ants.
Queen, A Bug’s Life
Ant and elephant quotes
1.) The world flatters the elephant and tramples on the ant.
Indian proverb
2.) It is the ant, not the lion, which the elephant fears.
Matshona Dhliwayo
3.) Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant.
Turkish proverb
4.) The ambitious one makes friends with the elephant, then tramples upon the ant.
Indian proverb
5.) When there’s an elephant in the room, you can’t pretend it isn’t there and just discuss the ants.
Ellen Wittlinger
6.) In watching for the ant, you let the elephant pass unnoticed
Indian proverb
7.) In every enemy that is an ant, behold an elephant.
Turkish proverb
8.) Though your enemy is the size of an ant, look upon him as an elephant.
Danish proverb
9.) He who cannot pick up an ant, and wants to pick up an elephant will some day see his folly.
African proverb
10.) An elephant may be big, but it falls on its face more often than an ant.
Unknown
Check out these great elephant quotes and sayings.
Famous ant proverbs and sayings
1.) Every ruler sleeps on an anthill.
Afghani proverb
2.) An ant is over six feet tall when measured by its own foot-rule.
Slovenian proverb
3.) Even the wishes of a small ant reach heaven.
Japanese proverb
4.) An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.
Mexican proverb
5.) The tiny ant dares to enter the lion’s ear.
Armenian proverb
6.) Even the ant has his bite.
Turkish proverb
7.) Where the sugar is, there will the ant be also.
Filipino proverb
8.) A tree not taller than an ant cannot shade you.
Nigerian proverb
9.) To the ant, a few drops of dew is a flood.
Iranian proverb
10.) Any spoke will lead the ant to the hub.
Unknown
11.) Even the sharpest ear cannot hear an ant singing.
Sudanese proverb
More proverbial ant sayings
12.) When the water rises the fish eat the ants, when the water falls the ants eat the fish.
Unknown
13.) Be on the alert, like the red ant that moves with its claws wide open.
Ugandan proverb
14.) None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.
Unknown
15.) An ant hole may collapse an embankment.
Japanese proverb
16.) He who runs from the white ant may stumble upon the stinging ant.
Nigerian proverb
17.) The eyeless ant asked God: ‘Give me eye-lashes’.
Georgian proverb
18.) At high tide fish eat ants; at low tide ants eat fish.
Thailand proverb
19.) In an ant colony, dew is a flood.
Afghan proverb
20.) The constant creeping of ants will wear away the stone.
Unknown
21.) He who storms in like a whirlwind returns like an ant.
Borneo proverb
22.) Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.
Bible (Proverbs 6:6)
23.) For an ant to have wings would be his undoing.
Iranian proverb
Ant quotes in poetry / literature
1.) Turn on the prudent
Ant, thy heedful eyes,
Observe her labours,
Sluggard, and be wise.
Samuel Johnson
2.) Forbear thou great good husband, little ant:
A little respite from thy flood of sweat;
Thou, thine own horse and cart under this plant
Thy spacious tent, fan thy prodigious heat;
Down with thy double load of that one grain;
It is a granarie for all thy train.
Richard Lovelace
3.) The ant crept forth to her daily toil, the butterfly fluttered and basked in the warm rays of the sun; myriads of insects spread their transparent wings, and revelled in their brief but happy existence. Man walked forth, elated with the scene; and all was brightness and splendour.
Charles Dickens
4.) It won’t be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it won’t be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it.
Don Marquis
Thanks for reading these ant quotes about strength, achievement, and inspiration. You may also enjoy reading these quote lists:
By Greg Johnson | Published 5/6/2021
