The Elephant Man Quotes & Sayings

My old man always told me never do anything during the day that will keep you awake at night. — Jonathan Dunne

To keep a man a slave you do much the same as the cruel circus masters did to the elephant around the turn of last century. Clamp heavy chains around their legs and stake them to the ground. Then beat and terrorize them. After a while you no longer even have to stake the chain; the elephant gives up and just the mere rattle of the chain convinces the elephant there is no hope, so they give up and do whatever it is the circus requires. — Glenn Beck

I'll do anything to keep everyone laughing. Things get too intense on film sets. I remember on The Elephant Man, I used to imitate a cat without moving my lips. David Lynch would say, "Cut! Sorry, we've got a noise somewhere on set." Everyone would be looking around for this cat. — Anthony Hopkins

When she's gone, Tom dares to look at Sam and then the ultrasound photo again. You've fathered the elephant man. Someone has to tell her. — Melina Marchetta

And now that Wells had heard him laugh, he wondered whether the so-called Elephant Man had not in fact been smiling at him from the moment he stepped into the room, a warm, friendly smile intended to sooth the discomfort his appearance produced in his guests, a smile no one would ever see.
As he left the room, he felt a tear roll down his cheek. — Felix J. Palma

The largest land animal is the elephant, and it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language of its country and obeys orders, remembers duties that it has been taught, is pleased by affection and by marks of honour, nay more it possesses virtues rare even in man, honesty, wisdom, justice, also respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and moon. — Pliny The Elder

There were
things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he
had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot
he forgot. The light
had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant
shadows. — Joseph Conrad

I'm not certain you'd know the right sort of man for you if he arrived on our doorstep riding an elephant."
"I would think the elephant would be a fairly good indication that I ought to look elsewhere. — Julia Quinn

What ever happened to freak shows? Back in the twenties when elephant man was born at least he had a job waiting for him. — Doug Stanhope

In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos, become conscious of itself.
So, the Devil's Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight - something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection - and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos. — Richard Dawkins

You see pictures of Buddha and he's sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross. — Dave Eggers

To live with his physical hideousness, incapacitating deformities and unremiting pain is trial enough, but to be exposed to the cruelly lacerating expressions of horror and disgust by all who behold him -- is even more difficult to bear. [...] For in order to survive, Merrick forces himself to suffer these humiliations, I repeat, humiliations, in order to survive, thus he exposes himself to crowds who pay to gape and yawp at this freak of nature, the Elephant Man. — Bernard Pomerance

Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing - if this must come - seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. — Peter Matthiessen

But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome. — Isabella Rossellini

The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!"
Alek tried not to laugh. "Then what does the elephant stand on, madam?"
"Don't try to be clever, young man." She narrowed her eyes. "It's elephants all the way down! — Scott Westerfeld

I really wanted to work with David Lynch. I was a big fan of The Elephant Man and Eraserhead. — Sting

You may as well bid an elephant fly in the air, as a covetous man live by faith. — Thomas Watson

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish. — Beryl Markham

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. — James Joyce

In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what's usually ignored is the fact that each man's description was correct. What Faye won't understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn't that they were blind - it's that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. — Nathan Hill

And that's the best thing about this crazy journey: I am forgetting that I'm an old man instead of the Alzheimer's reminding me by forgetting — Jonathan Dunne

Some kinds of animals burrow in the ground; others do not. Some animals are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others use the hours of daylight. There are tame animals and wild animals. Man and the mule are always tame; the leopard and the wolf are invariably wild, and others, as the elephant, are easily tamed. — Aristotle.

Every Man being conscious to himself, That he thinks, and that which his Mind is employ'd about whilst thinking, being the Ideas, that are there, 'tis past doubt, that Men have in their Minds several Ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, and others: It is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being. — John Locke

The four movies I can remember seeing as a kid were 'The Elephant Man,' 'The Magnificent Seven,' 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly' and 'Mad Max!' Two of those are westerns. So the western genre is emblazoned on my memory from childhood, and those are two great movies. — Casey Affleck

Kalaj would say, "I've got the eyes of a lynx, the memory of an elephant, the instincts of a wolf ... "
" ... and the brain of a tapir," would interrupt his nemesis, the Algerian. — Andre Aciman

You still with your floozy girlfriend?" Ah, there is was. The elephant in the car ...
He gave her an incredulous look. "Obviously not."
She smacked him on his arm. "Don't look at me like I asked a stupid question. Because it not a stupid question at all, and you damn well know it."
"Fine."
"So you broke up with her?"
"Yes," he said sharply.
"Way to find your balls, man," Ada congratulated him and sat back in her seat. — Karina Halle

Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man
and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is 'bad. — Frank Zappa

You're Shane, right?'
He inched away from her and managed a quick nod as he twisted the rag he held in his fingers.
'Heidi sad you were willing to teach me how to ride.' Her expression shifted from entertained to confused, as if she was wondering why no one had mentioned he was a can or two shy of a six-pack.
'A horse,' he clarified, then wanted to kick himself. What else but a horse? Did he think she was here to learn to ride his mother's elephant?
One corner of Annabelle's perfect, full mouth twitched. 'A horse would be good. You seem to have several.'
He wanted to remind himself that he was usually fine around women. Smooth even. He was intelligent, funny and could, on occasion, be charming. Just not now, with his blood pumping and his brain doing nothing more than shouting "it's her, it's her" over and over again.
Chemistry, he thought grimly. It could turn the smartest man into a drooling idiot. Here he was, proving the theory true. — Susan Mallery

I always think I look like the Elephant Man - I can't get used to my own image. — Brian Cox

Though words are arbitrary in their primitive institution, yet when once their signification is fixed, we are no more entitled to alter it than to call a tree an elephant; for, being no man's private possession, but the common measures of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in; at least where there is a necessity to do so, notice of it should be given. — Richard Kirwan

You know you really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the University level. Like where Freud studied and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working round the clock thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about because that's the only way you're going to get better. — Jerry Seinfeld

I first got involved with Mel Brooks through 'The Elephant Man.' Everybody knows now, but they didn't know at the time that he was the producer. — John Hurt

It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. — Havelock Ellis

You think I'll succumb after a ten second kiss?"

The man had an ego of an elephant. She measured the knowing curve of his smile, the infuriating glint in his eyes and knew she could stand anything for ten seconds. All she had to do was clamp her jaw and she'd win. Victory was at hand.

"Okay, Masterson. You're on. — Carol Devine

This man, lady, hath robb'd many beasts of their particular additions: he is as valiant as a lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant-a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crush'd into folly, his folly sauced with discretion. — William Shakespeare

The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents
or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. — C.S. Lewis

Always drawn to the theatric, Bowie also performed in stage productions of "The Elephant Man" and just recently collaborated on "Lazarus," an off-Broadway musical that's a sequel to his 1976 role in the film "The Man Who Fell To Earth." — David Bowie

The elephant is never won by anger; nor must that man who would reclaim a lion take him by the teeth. — John Dryden

I saw David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' when I was 15. I was completely bowled over. I found it so beautiful, strange and mesmerizing that I went back to the cinema every night for a week to see it. — Ben Daniels

The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant. — Terry Pratchett

The Elephant Man claimed his head was big because, it's so full of dreams. Actually, it's because his skull was shaped like a turkey. — Dana Gould

While I paid, they exchanged some pieties on how everyone has his or her own beliefs, et cetera. Then the woman said, "It's just like, ten people see a car accident, every single one is gonna tell the police something different" (a vivid way, I thought, of localizing the story about the blind men feeling an elephant).
"Tell me which one of 'em gets out to help," the man said, "that's the one whose religion I'll listen to. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell's own price in the end, but if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, storm the Dark Tower and win it? What could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one's object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephant. But to gain one's object as a monster ... To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it? — Stephen King

We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea. — Richard Feynman

No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of prejudice. — Dan Brown

There was talk of the Centaur being moved into the elephant cages to make room for a banjo-picking Minotaur. Surrendering his meager furnishings to a musical half man half bull was all bull. — Don Roff

Three blind men were shown an elephant. They touched it with their hands to determine what the creature was. The first man felt the trunk, and claimed that an elephant was like a snake. The second man touched its leg and claimed that an elephant was like a tree. The third man touched its tail, and claimed that the elephant was like a slender rope. I — Jim Butcher

Those of us who are in tune with nature and animals know it is our way of life, Bram. There is a connection to all living things, a vibration of Life. Animals were not given a power of choice. A lion does not try and eat legumes, nor an elephant meat. We believe the best way to communicate with nature, God, is through a liaison: the animals ... Nature hears one voice and obeys it. That is why ten or ten thousand birds may rise from the surface of a lake at the same time and yet never touch one another. Man only hears his own voice. He constantly bumps into another. Even his voice mirrors his erratic walk, jealousy, hate, ego, pride, lying, cheating. He makes his own judgements and falls prey to his greed. Remember, the moon is reflected on one drop of water as is the entire ocean
so it is with God. He is reflected ins each living thing
in a grain of sand as the entire shore, one star as the whole universe. Each animal as in all creatures. -Jagrat — Ralph Helfer

I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting. — Beryl Markham

The night before 'The Elephant Man' opened, we had a sleepover for 12 kids. Being organized is the key. — Scott Ellis

I'm just getting settled as a responsible man - but if you split the elephant into little mouthfuls it will be fine. — Tom Hardy