Mule Quotes & Sayings

What we see of the world is the mind's
Invention and the mind
Though stained by it, becoming
Rivers, sun, mule-dung, flies-
Can instantly shift
A dirty bird in square time — Phillip Whalen

A man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue ... — Terry Pratchett

When I look back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring: you've got to have a tight jar or you'll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that wont, because you are a man. — William Faulkner

AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN
What is the aesthetician
But a mule hitched to the times? — Kenneth Koch

There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule. — Mark Twain

Excellence, he is known as the Mule. He is spoken of little, in a factual sense, but I have gathered the scraps and fragments of knowledge and winnowed out the most probable of them. He is apparently a man of neither birth nor standing. His father, unknown. His mother, dead in childbirth. His upbringing, that of a vagabond. His education, that of the tramp worlds, and the backwash alleys of space. He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical strength, and stubbornness of purpose. — Isaac Asimov

You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly. — Hank Williams

The North African mule talks always of his mother's brother, the horse, but never of his father, the donkey, in favor of others supposedly more reputable. — Clifford Geertz

I think of modern marriage as a car strangely fashioned out of an old abandoned horse carriage, built upon the framework of a mule cart. All the original engineering is still there, underneath it all. — Elizabeth Gilbert

God has given me a mule-like stubbornness to stick with a difficult problem and the intuitive powers to conceptualize complex hypothetical situations in my mind. — Albert Einstein

My favorite animal is the mule. He has more horse sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating - and he knows when to stop working. — Harry S. Truman

The world is a shoulder of dark meat (black flesh of an old mule). And the light is on the other side. — Federico Garcia Lorca

... a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, "If you don't whip me, I won't work." He didn't get whipped. He didn't work. — Robert M. Pirsig

Well, Arminius, I can't say you're the most natural horseman I've ever seen.'
Arminius sneered down at the men standing around him, then leaned out of the saddle and put a sausage sized finger in Double-Pay Silus's face.
'Just so we're clear, I hate horses. Tribune Scaurus says I ride like a mule tender with bleeding piles, and that I have all the skill in the saddle of a sack full of shit. And despite that, before you open your mouth, I'm one of your thirty-one horsemen and that's official. You don't like it, I don't like it, but the tribune couldn't give a toss what either of us think. Wherever Centurion Corvus goes, I go. So there it is. — Anthony Riches

Something's up,' I say, handing the phone back.
'Not necessarily,' Jack says.
'You think this is the first time Lila's been hot-headed? Seriously, dude, you do remember my sister, right? Short, blonde, impulsive as shock therapy? Stubborn as a mule who won't take no for an answer?'
Does Jack ever listen to himself?
Does he appreciate the irony of this statement? I shake my head at him in wonder.
'Hey, I'm not short or blond,' Jack protests as he catches the look on my face. — Sarah Alderson

Reach deep into your wallet and buy a decent mule. — Robert Fitterman

One has fear in front of a goat, in back of a mule, and on every side of a fool — E.W. Howe

It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance. — Gary Mule Deer

If Pierre buys a horse for two hundred francs and Jacques buys a mule for a hundred and forty, and the two enter into a partnership and decide to trade their creatures for a piece of land that costs four hundred and eighty francs, then how long will it take a lame Frenchman to borrow a silk umbrella? — Wally Lamb

To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy. — Alexander Theroux

He who has not an adventure has not horse or mule, so says Solomon.
Who is too adventurous, said Echephron,
loses horse and mule. — Francois Rabelais

That's two Appaloosas, two quarter horses and one mule, plus tack. They were ordered by a man called himself Theodore Roosevelt. No chance that would be the president, is there? — Hunter Shea

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. — Mark Twain

Not like I need an excuse to enjoy a Moscow mule, but this tray and six-mug set, handmade in Mexico with hammered recycled copper, makes cocktail hour extra special. — Oprah Winfrey

Kiernan hoists one of the bags and slips the strap over my shoulder. I grab the other one, and soon I'm loaded like a pack mule, lugging two bulky military duffels in addition to my backpack.
Trey leans down to give me a goodbye kiss, but his lips are quivering with barely suppressed laughter.
"What?"
"You should see yourself. The toga, the sandals, and now this. You look like a short Greek Rambo."
"Athena, Goddess of Modern War," Kiernan cracks as they get into the car. And now they're both laughing.
I pull up the stable point and blink out, now completely certain that the two of them riding in the same car was a very bad idea. — Rysa Walker

I'm just a pack mule. I've played leads and I've played character roles. Any actress in Hollywood will tell you as your age climbs, the leads thin. — Marcia Gay Harden

The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance. He does not learn to differentiate between troubles and difficulties, usually, until some real trouble bowls him over. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference. — Herbert Newton Casson

We're all of us what we are; and when it comes to turning ourselves into what we ought to be-well, it isn't easy. No, it isn't easy, Anthony Beavis. How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way when you've got chronic intestinal poisoning? Had it from birth I guess. Inherited it. And at the same time stooping, as you do. Slumped down on your mule like that - it's awful. Pressing down on the vertebrae like a ton of bricks. One can almost hear the poor things grinding together. And when the spine's in that state, what happens to the rest of the machine? It's frightful to think of. — Aldous Huxley

Don't you give me that postmodern bullshit. There is truth, There is a truth. And what you want, or you feel, or you need, isn't going to change the truth. Any more than it's going to topple a skyscraper. There's truth, and there's belief. Don't call a mule a stallion. — Carol Plum-Ucci

He thinks I will hit him. Strike him, with a large stick. Foolish mule. Oh no, I am much more cunning. I will surprise him with kindness ... until he grows calm and dispenses with all watchfulness, and then ... ha! I shall punch him in the nose! Won't he be surprised! No mule can match wits with me. Oh yes, many have tried, and almost all have failed! — Steven Erikson

Playing in an independent rock band will eventually make you equal parts truck driver, gladiator and mule. Glamour is for those with trust funds. — Neko Case

His gut clenched. He'd thought she was different. Thought she appreciated the man he was, not the out-of-all-proportion legend the sensationalists depicted. Was that what she wanted? Some larger-than-life hero? If so, he didn't stand a chance. She'd never be satisfied with a humble mule trainer. He'd worked hard to put life as a bounty hunter behind him. He wouldn't be that man again. Not even for her. — Karen Witemeyer

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy. — Robert M. Pirsig

Thirrin pointedly ingnored the long woollen warmers that Oskan had carefully rolled down over the ears of his mule, Jenny. Even the fact that they were bright yellow with red pom-poms on the very tips didn't drag any sort of comment out of her. — Stuart Hill

We stock up on popcorn and candy like we're crossing the Sierras, don't we? I'll have a couple of soft pretzels, a hot dog, Milk Duds, Snocaps. Is that the largest popcorn you've got there, that bucket? You don't have a barrel or anything like that? Do you have a donkey or a pack mule or anything? - Oh, and a Diet Coke. — Ellen DeGeneres

The National Park Service shot a mule in the face. He survived but had trouble swallowing and often food came out of his nose. — Cleveland Amory

The Lady of Spring must love you dearly."
"As a teamster loves his mule that carries his baggage," said Cazaril bitterly, "whipping it over the high passes. — Lois McMaster Bujold

Now, I'm for interracial marriage. I'm for same-sex marriage. I'm the one that introduced the bill to have same-sex marriage. I don't care who marry who. If a man meet a little mule and he wanna get married to the little mule, as long as he and the little mule get along all right, that's fine with me. It doesn't bother me any kind of way. — Alvin Holmes

Although I was simply what today would be called a "mule" - the bottom of the food chain in the drug biz - the federal system treated me from beginning to end like a major criminal, and I still don't know why, other than that in those days, 6.5 ounces of heroin was a big load. Ludicrous by today's standards, when coke, heroin, and weed are shipped across the border by the ton. — Patricia McConnell

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That's where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts. We never got the 40 acres. We went all the way to Herbert Hoover, and we never got the 40 acres. We didn't get the mule. So we decided we'd ride this donkey as far as it would take us. — Al Sharpton

A tree in the middle of a giant rock may grow up if it is stubborn like hell! Sometimes to be successful in life is simply made up of being stubborn as a mule! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

WHY IS MY BATH COLD? Because I, purchaser of sadist shoes, needed to soak after wearing cheese graters on my feet yesterday and then traveling and walking and sitting through meetings and touring facilities and impersonating a pack mule today. 'Twas not meant to be. — Qwen Salsbury

I never did try to make my daddy understand why I left for the army the way I did. I just thought, because he loved me, he should let it go, and if he couldn't, well then he didn't love me like I thought. Young folks get love and understandin' backward, don't they? Love don't come galloping across fresh pastures like a fine white horse with understandin' riding soft and easy on its back. Understandin' plods in like an old plow mule, breaking sod. It shades the earth with its body, and waters it with sweat. Love grows up in the furrow that's left behind. It takes some patience. I was an impatient young man. ~Claude Fisher — Lisa Wingate

My granddad used to say, If everybody liked the same thing, they'd all be after your grandma. — Gary Mule Deer

I would have beaten Bloomberg like a rented mule. — Anthony Weiner

I developed my style by pickin' a lot of cotton, plowin' that ole mule every day. I just got the rhythm, and any rhythm I need I know where it is; I know where to find it. — John Hunter

I hate and fear violence myself, have always avoided barroom brawls, and tho' I'm a bit of a gun-nut, and a member of the NRA, I never shoot at anything but beer cans and mule deer. (In season.) And seldom hit either, except by accident. — Edward Abbey

I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power. — Mark Rippetoe

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. — Vladimir Nabokov

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule? — Terry Pratchett

My earliest memory is learning to read 'Muffin the Mule' when I was about three. — Mark E. Smith

Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Do you want me to ride you like a rented mule, or do you prefer to be Mr. Missionary Position? I'm fine with wither, so it doesn't matter to me. — Katie MacAlister

Mimoo shook her head. "Too sleepy for her maybe, but ideal for her mother, who worries too much. I don't need excitement in my life. I've had enough of it, thank you." She shrugged. "Gia will be fine. She'll be fine anywhere."
"Gia?"
"It's Gia when I love her," said Mimoo. "My husband never called her anything but that. Me, I love her, but she drives me crazy. So headstrong. To call her stubborn like a mule is an injustice to mules. The mules are St. Francis compared to her."
Harry laughed. — Paullina Simons

Don't think of yourself as a surrogate mule, think of yourself as an entrepreneur of the physical. — George Saunders

Nod house turned into shout
house. In the shout house memory
said shut up. It said silence,
misery said amen, the mule's
head
meant my stubborn lungs. . .
I stood
imagining I fell back dreaming,
stuck tongue stuck in my jaw
broke
my jaw — Nathaniel Mackey

Don't come yet, boy! You betta hold onto God's unchanging hand! You betta hold yo mule while you shout! — Quan Millz

The mule," he was fond of saying, "is as much smarter than a horse as a raven is smarter than a falcon. Neither a raven nor a mule will go charging into combat just because some human tells him to. — Randall Garrett

The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible. — Isabel Wilkerson

Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators. — Victor LaValle

I thought we were going to take a 20-mule team out to the Grand Canyon and get a Bunsen burner and a bow and arrow, and whatever you can catch you cook. And it's gotta be gourmet and it better look good. — The Creators Of Top Chef

A mind is accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations of astrology, resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle. — Johannes Kepler

Rory, I want to say that death is what you've always wanted. But that can't be the Truth. [This time] we can blame it on me. I'll be the packing mule, carry all the burden. & you, you can be a child again; fold your church hands like dirty laundry [crease them tight]. Nobody has to know about us, not my father
nor yours --
No, not even God — Christopher Soto

A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.
[On his inability to keep for himself a profitable income from his invention of the Spinning Mule.] — Samuel Crompton

Seems Brood lost his temper.'
'Gods! With whom? Kallor? That bastard deserves-'
'Not Kallor, friend,' Coll growled. 'Make another guess - shouldn't take you long.'
Murillio groaned. 'Kruppe.'
'Hood knows he's stretched the patience of all of us at one time or another. only none of us was capable of splitting apart half the world and throwing new mountains skyward.'
'Did the little runt get himself killed? I can't believe-'
'Word is, he's come out unscathed. Typically. Complaining of the dust. No-one else was injured, either, though the warlord himself almost got his head kicked in by an angry mule.'
'Kruppe's mule? The one that sleeps when it walks?'
'Aye, the very one. — Steven Erikson

You been forgetting Who's in charge and who ain't. So here's what I'm gone do: I'm gone send a storm so big it rips the roof off the shed where you keep that mule you so proud of. Then I'm gone send hail big as walnuts down on that mule, making it break its leg trying to bust out of there. Then, just so you know for sure it's Me you dealing with, the next morning after you put that mule down and buried it and you up on the ladder trying to nail the roof back onto the shed I'm gone to let that weak top rung, the one you ain't got around to fixing yet, I'm gone let it rot all the way through so you fall off and break your own leg, and I'm gone to send Florence and Lilly Mae to a birthing and the twins out to the far end of the field so you laying there half the day. That'll give you time to think real hard on what I been trying to tell you. — Hillary Jordan

What's she like? The princess, I mean."
"Bullheaded. She's red headed, blue-eyed, and stubborn as a mule. — Christina Mobley

spring. The enormous economic impact of the mule trade and how Oregon Trail traffic stimulated the American economy have been frequently ignored by historians, mostly because it is a lot more prestigious for professional academics to sound learned about Senator Thomas Hart Benton or the Missouri Compromise than to actually know something about America's basic means of transportation for a century - wagons and mules. Yes, — Rinker Buck

He knew Muhammad Iffat was of Turkish descent and stubborn as a mule. — Naguib Mahfouz

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. — Ron Rash

Solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen.
***
Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. — Virginia Woolf

-Cheap? I could have bought a whole pig
with that coin jester.
-Exactly my Lord. And while some may eat a mule, no one can ride a pig. — Angelo Tsanatelis

Performing on a stool, we've got a sight to make you drool, seven virgins and a mule, keep it cool, keep it cool. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whit looks like an angel when she sleeps. She's all sweet, full lips, long, curly eyelashes, and a tumble of sleek, dark hair against the pillow.
She also kicks like a mule, snores like a bear, sweats like a hog, and steals the covers like a fat, menacing caterpillar about to cocoon herself before her metamorphosis. - Deo — Liz Reinhardt

Kiernan and baseball - it's like waving a carrot in front of a mule. Put tickets to a ballgame in front of Kiernan's face and he'll follow you pretty much wherever you want to go. After that first game we attended in 1905, it didn't take much for me to convince him to see another game in 1912, and then one in 1924, and so on. — Rysa Walker

Truly, there are no justified ways to how a mule tramples the earth, but who would be burdened to hear such an obscurity? We do not gaze upon stars to appertain affection towards them, rather to sooth our contempt fallacy of an ill-placed apprehension of them. Who concern themselves with anything if not genuine in their convictions? Delusions? I am flattered no less. — Phil Volatile

When the sun was fully up, the gunslinger moved on west. He would find another horse eventually, or a mule, but for now he was content to walk. All that day he was haunted by a ringing, singing sound in his ears, a sound like bells. Several times he stopped and looked around, sure he would see a dark following shape flowing over the ground, chasing after as the shadows of our best and worst memories chase after, but no shape was ever there. He was alone in the low hill country west of Eluria. Quite alone. — Stephen King

Bessie, the old gray mule, had two speeds: slow and stop. A stick of dynamite could not have put any more giddy-up in her pace ... — Carolyn Brown

When afterwards he mentioned the names of the Tartars he had got to know on his pilgrimage, like Hallimulabalibay, to which he added a whole string of names he had himself invented, like Valivolavalivey, Malimulamalimey, Lieutenant Lukas could not stop himself from sying: 'I'll kick your backside, you mule. Go on, and be brief and to the point! — Jaroslav Hasek

My job had been to get the package from point A to point B and what happened after that did not need to concern me. I was just the mule. — S.A. Tawks

Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring. — James Ensor

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite. — Ken Kesey

She was so ugly she could make a mule back away from an oat bin. — Will Rogers

I pat my mule's neck and find comfort in the silky tufts of her mane. Father told me not to brood when people judged me for my wrapper, not my filling, or I would spend my whole life in the steamer. — Stacey Lee

Call had never thought much about age. Charlie Goodnight liked to talk about it, but Call found the talk tedious. He was as old as he was, like everyone else; as long as he could still go when he needed to go, age didn't matter much. He was still able, within reason, to do what he had a mind to do. But he'd had a mind to kill the large doe, and he hadn't. Of course, he wasn't an exceptional shot. He had missed mule deer before, but the fact that he had missed this one just when he had, was troubling. They were just coming into the home country of the young bandit, a boy with a keen eye and a German rifle with a telescope sight. Getting a knuckle stuck in a trigger guard would not be wise, in a contest with Joey Garza. — Larry McMurtry

Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife. — Luc Sante

Mining is the art of exploiting mineral deposits at a profit. An unprofitable mine is fit only for the sepulcher of a dead mule. — T.A. Rickard

I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant. — S.A. Tawks

A mule has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. — Robert Green Ingersoll

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves. — LaTanya Richardson

People who have been hunting all their lives with no compunction to consider the exchange they make and the gravity of the trade, I don't know where to put them. I just remind myself there are too many mule deer for the earth to handle, and before my inner dialogue says we took their space, not the other way around, I try to change the channel. — Liz Stephens

Well, the devil's in the alley, mule's in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all. — Bob Dylan

The youth had resolved not to budge whatever should happen. Some arrows of scorn that had buried themselves in his heart had generated strange and unspeakable hatred. It was clear to him that his final and absolute revenge was to be achieved by his dead body lying, torn and gluttering, upon the field. This was to be a poignant retaliation upon the officer who had said "mule drivers," and later "mud diggers," for in all the wild graspings of his mind for a unit responsible for his sufferings and commotions he always seized upon the man who had dubbed him wrongly. And it was his idea, vaguely formulated, that his corpse would be for those eyes a great and salt reproach. — Stephen Crane

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once. — William Faulkner

I grew up hard. I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano. — Pinetop Perkins

Don't push her. Let her go at her own speed. Push her and every mule in the county'd be easier to live with. — Harper Lee

It's stupid to be that way, so easily hurt; it's better to be like a plank of wood, an emotional mule. It's best not to feel, ... best to have your nerve endings cauterized. — Sonya Hartnett

My wife called me a mule. She once said, "I didn't marry a man; I married a mule!" I kept thinking about it. It was in the back of my head. I think it makes a good title for an album. — Tom Waits

It turned out to be a young Dasypus novemcinctus, a nine-banded armadillo, about the size of a small loaf of bread. Although they were becoming more common in Texas, I'd never seen one up close before. Anatomically speaking, it resembled the unhappy melding of an anteater (the face), a mule (the ears), and a tortoise (the carapace). I thought it overall an unlucky creature in the looks department, but Granddaddy once said that to apply a human definition of beauty to an animal that had managed to thrive for millions of years was both unscientific and foolish. — Jacqueline Kelly

I'm lucky, because I started action movies at the age of 25. Now I'm 47, and I'm still kicking like a mule, and I'm as flexible as before. — Jean-Claude Van Damme