Turtle Quotes

“When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle - we used to call him Tortoise -""Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?" Alice asked."We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: "really you are very dull!”

“Dill said striking a match under a turtle was hateful."Ain't hateful, just persuades him- 's not like you'd chunk him in the fire," Jem growled."How do you know a match don't hurt him?""Turtles can't feel , stupid," said Jem."Were you ever a turtle, huh?”

“If superstition could contradict science, the world may as well be on the back of a turtle. But giving into turtle worship was a bridge too far.”

“The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian’s Doug Erwin, is that we can’t predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors."There will be plenty of surprises. Let’s face it: who would’ve predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn’t exist, no vertebrate biologist would’ve suggested that anything would do that: he’d have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.”

“Human beings can learn valuable lessons in conservation of necessary personal resources for accomplishing the fundamental tenants of life by observing a judiciously paced turtle determinedly and stealthily traversing the world.”

“Years later, in a high-school biology class, Samuel heard a story about a certain kind of African turtle that swam across the ocean to lay its eggs in South America. Scientists could find no reason for the enormous trip. Why did the turtles do it? The leading theory was that they began doing eons ago, when South America and Africa were still locked together. Back then, only a river might have separated the continents, and the turtles laid their eggs on the river's far bank. But then the continents began drifting apart, and the river widened by about an inch per year, which would have been invisible to the turtles. So they kept going to the same spot, the far bank of the river, each generation swimming a tiny bit farther than the last one, and after a hundred million years of this, the river had become an ocean, and yet the turtles never noticed.This, Samuel decided, was the manner of his mother's departure. This was how she moved away - imperceptibly, slowly, bit by bit.”

“Try to be like the turtle - at ease in your own shell.”

“Suppose a man threw into the sea a yoke with one hole in it, and the east wind carried it to the west, and the west wind carried it to the east, and the north wind carried it to the south, and the south wind carried it to the north. Suppose there were a blind turtle that came up once at the end of each century. What do you think, bhikkhus? Would that blind turtle put his neck into that yoke with one hole in it?""He might, venerable sir, sometime or other at the end of a long period.""Bhikkhus, the blind turtle would sooner put his neck into that yoke with a single hole in it than a fool, once gone to perdition, would take to regain the human state, I say. Why is that? Because there is no practising of the Dhamma there, no practising of what is righteous, no doing of what is wholesome, no performance of merit. There mutual devouring prevails, and the slaughter of the weak.”

“Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.”