I spend most of my spare time writing about how to get rid of fleas, but do you know what? There’s a little part of me that has a sneaking admiration for my perpetual foe. They are hardy little pest, tenacious and really quite a worthy adversary. No wonder then that they have inspired a few quotations over the years, from the Bible to Cole Porter. Here are a few of my favourites:
- “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”
Proverb
- “Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don’t bite everybody.”
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
- “You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”
Marian Wright Edelman
- “If you go long enough without a bath, even the fleas will leave you alone.”
Ernie Pyle
- “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”
Cole Porter
- “Fleas can be taught nearly everything that a congressman can.”
Mark Twain
- “Ambition and fleas both jump high.”
German proverb
- “The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can.”
John Donne
- “Life would be a perpetual flea hunt if a man were obliged to run down all the innuendoes, inveracities, and insinuations and misrepresentations which are uttered against him.”
Henry Ward Beecher
- “Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a flea and a louse”
Samuel Johnson
- “So, naturalists observe, a flea – Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; and those have smaller still to bite ‘em; And so proceed ad infinitum.”
Jonathan Swift
- “I do honour the very flea of his dog.”
Ben Jonson
- “The fatter the flea, the leaner the dog.“
German proverb
- Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot create a flea, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.”
Michel de Montaigne
- “A dog in a kennel barks at his fleas; a dog hunting does not notice them.”
Proverb
- “A man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat.”
Don Marquis
- “A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog – keeps him from brooding over being a dog.“
Anon
- “Do nothing hastily but the catching of fleas.”
Thomas Fuller
And my personal favourite:
- “Buy one dog, get one flea!“
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