Hive Like Quotes & Sayings

Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why - it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters - the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle. — Richard Dawkins

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience ...
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real. — Jaron Lanier

I will not doubt, though sorrows fall like rain, And troubles swarm like bees about a hive; I shall believe the heights for which I strive Are only reached by anguish and by pain; And though I groan and tremble with my crosses, I yet shall see, through my severest losses, The greater gain. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

He who does not attempt to make peace / When small discords arise, / Is like the bee's hive which leaks drops of honey / Soon, the whole hive collapses. — Akkineni Nagarjuna

I'm a girl of extremes. When I love something, I'm like a puppy dog (without all the licking). When I'm cranky, I'm a wasp (like a whole hive of 'em). And when I'm angry, I'm a Mother Bear with a predator after her cubs: Dangerous. — James Patterson

Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home. — Abraham Joshua Heschel

A sound of laughter was heard-they turned sharply. Vera Claythorne was standing in the yard. She cried out in a high shrill voice, shaken with wild bursts of laughter:
"Do they keep bees on this island? Tell me that. Where do we go for honey? Ha! ha!"
They stared at her uncomprehendingly. It was as though the sane well-balanced girl had gone mad right before their eyes. She went on in that high unnatural voice:
"Don't stare like that! As though you thought I was mad. It's sane enough what I'm asking. Bees, hives, bees! Oh, don't you understand? Haven't you read that idiotic rhyme? It's up in all of your bedrooms-put it there for you to study! We might have come here straightaway if we'd had sense. Seven little soldiers chopping up sticks. And the next verse, I know the whole thing by heart, I tell you! Six little soldier boys playing with a hive. And that's why I'm asking-do they keep bees on this island- isn't it damned funny ... ? — Agatha Christie

The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren't even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman's conception of a giant intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. — Robert A. Heinlein

Kaz is ... I don't know, he's like nobody else I've ever known. He surprises me." "Yes. Like a hive of bees in your dresser drawer." Jesper barked a laugh. "Just like that. — Leigh Bardugo

The city was a hive from this height, the people and the yellow cabs moving about in the street below like pre-programmed insects. (Dark City Lights) — David Levien

Stories hang from the trees, hive under the coffee table, gather like glass on the corners of the road. To pick them up one needs simply to focus one's eye and keep a steady hand. Writing focuses the eye; writing develops the steadiness of one's hand. — Bonnie Friedman

Introduction to Poetry
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means. — Billy Collins

It was a great thing to be a human being. It was something tremendous. Suddenly I'm conscious of a million sensations buzzing in me like bees in a hive. Gentlemen, it was a great thing. — Karel Capek

Learn to self-conquest, persevere thus for a time, and you will perceive very clearly the advantage which you gain from it. As soon you apply yourself to orison, you will at once feel your senses gather themselves together: they seem like bees which return to the hive and there shut themselves up to work at the making of honey. At the first call of the will, they come back more and more quickly. At last, after countless exercises, of this kind, God disposes them to a state of utter rest and of perfect contemplation. — Teresa Of Avila

Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive. — Charles Caleb Colton

Dale, a Plutonian Dreg Bug, the kind with seventeen eyes and a bad temper, got nailed in one of his eyes by a wild dart. Fight broke out when he punched Earl in the nose. Earl's nose is very sensitive, hell it's how he sees, sort of. Earl plopped down on the floor crying when a Flying Mugwhap flew over and ate Dale's eye. Dale grabbed the Mugwhap and squeezed a good deal of the life out of it before the bouncer stopped him. Karen, the bouncer, is a reticulated Hive Mother, and a mean mother when she's pissed off. She walked over and flicked Dale upside his head. That flick knocked Dale out cold, and cost him two more eyes when he hit the wall. She helped Earl up and bought him a drink. A nasty drink by all the comments I've heard. Something between varnish and the stuff people get in the corners of their mouths with a nice aftertaste of silver polish. Earl seemed to like it though. — Neil Leckman

Throw the word "bargain" around a few times, and people will swarm the tiredest old dreck like bees in search of a new hive. Or maybe locusts, ready to strip the place bare. They even buzzed like swarming insects. Voices raised in conversation and laughter, plus the occasional shrieks of a tired child, formed a background roar that still failed to drown out the tired tinkle of Christmas music piped over the top. I'd only been here ten minutes and already I'd heard White Christmas twice. Two times too many in my book. — Marina Finlayson

Suddenly there was a humming in the air, and the bees were there too. They flowed out of Granny Weatherwax's hive, circling Tiffany like a halo, crowning her, and swarm and girl stood on the threshold of the cottage and Tiffany reached out her arms and the bees settled along them, and welcomed her home. — Terry Pratchett

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive ... — Desiderius Erasmus

There is a number among us, young and old, of all sorts almost among us, that swarm up and down towns, and woods, and fields, whose care and work hitherto hath been like bees, only to get honey to their own hive. — Thomas Shepard

Humility must always be doing its work like a bee making honey in the hive: without humility all will be lost. — Teresa Of Avila

A Christian without a church is like a bee without a hive. — Suzanne Woods Fisher

Masters, holding aloft a hard-boiled egg from the free lunch as if it were a crystal ball, said, "Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?" Smiling, they shook their heads. "I'll bet you haven't. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do - when you do - " He looked at the egg for a moment more, then took a large bite of it and turned to Stoner, his jaws working and his dark eyes bright. — John Edward Williams

his left shoulder. As Ramirez started in that direction, Jabawski called after him, laughing, "Watch out for the big bad wolf, he's got a mouth on him, too." ### Everything was moving in slow motion. Or at least it appeared to be. Police officers and crime scene technicians swarmed like worker bees from the hive, scouting out their surroundings meticulously, in hope of finding even the most minuscule of clues. I'd spoken to several officers and carefully detailed my actions before finding — Harley Christensen

I have never seen an adequate description anywhere of the amazement, the uncomprehending horror of the bulk of the American people which preceded the firing of that gun at Sumter. Politicians or far-sighted leaders on both sides knew what was coming. And it is they who have written histories of the war. But to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake. Their protest arose from sea to sea like the clamor of a gigantic hive of frightened bees. — Rebecca Harding Davis

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive. — Jean Cocteau

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives which were people. — Virginia Woolf

You are being trained to be a Queen, but you do not have to act like one until y ou get your own hive. Being a Queen will not overtax you as you will never be called upon to use your mind on any major matter. You will use the National Mind, their mind. It's very restful ... — Elizabeth Hawes

We're not always selfish hypocrites. We also have the ability, under special circumstances, to shut down our petty selves and become like cells in a larger body, or like bees in a hive, working for the good of the group. These experiences are often among the most cherished of our lives, although our hivishness can blind us to other moral concerns. Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide. — Jonathan Haidt

This building disguised as a house of worship, was rather like a hive. A backward hive, for honeybees, at least, have the good sense to worship the female that gifts them all with life. They do not hold their drones in such high esteem. But here, is the hive of hornets, the males flitted flower to flower, pollinating, and stinging and injecting their poison. — Ellen Hopkins

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees. — Katherine Dunn

Before that, before it was ever a hotel at all, five full centuries ago, it was the home of a wealthy privateer who gave up raiding ships to study bees in the pastures outside Saint-Malo, scribbling in notebooks and eating honey straight from combs. The crests above the door lintels still have bumblebees carved into the oak; the ivy-covered fountain in the courtyard is shaped like a hive. Werner's favorites are five faded frescoes on the ceilings of the grandest upper rooms, where bees as big as children float against blue backdrops, big lazy drones and workers with diaphanous wings - where, above a hexagonal bathtub, a single nine-foot-long queen, with multiple eyes and a golden-furred abdomen, curls across the ceiling. — Anthony Doerr

The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze. — John Updike

Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way. — Neil Gaiman

In the empty lobby outside the Dance Hall she paused to scent the air from the landing board. The orchard was sweet and cool in the rising dawn, and the rain had almost stopped. The comb began to thrum as the hive awoke and the multitude of sisters began moving. Once desperate to be out on the wing, Flora no longer wanted to forage, only to be still and breather sweet wax.

The egg in her belly glowed bright inside her like a tiny sun. — Laline Paull

Studied all year and wrote in my journal like a nun works a Rosary, dog with a new bone, bee in his hive's back room. — Dennis Vickers

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive. — Jean Cocteau

We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy. — Irene Nemirovsky

Paulo plugged in the machine, which looked like the mutant offspring of a vacuum cleaner and a toaster oven, and showed them how to place wood chips in the bottom. Then he lit the wood chips with a long match and aimed the metal contraption at the opening of the hive. Puffs of smoke wafted around the hive and then blew straight in. Almost immediately the bees, which had been flying haphazardly around the room, raced back to the hive, and the buzzing inside grew louder and louder. — Wendy Mass

Democracy does not contain any force which will check the constant tendency to put more and more on the public payroll. The state is like a hive of bees in which the drones display, multiply and starve the workers so the idlers will consume the food and the workers will perish. — Plato