Mice

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and silver eye.

A mouse (plural: mice) is a small mammal belonging to the order of rodents, characteristically having a pointed snout, small rounded ears, and a long naked or almost hairless tail. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (Mus musculus). It is also a popular pet. In some places, certain kinds of field mice are also common. They are known to invade homes for food and occasionally shelter.

Quotes

• MOUSE, n. An animal which strews its path with fainting women.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• A cube of cheese no larger than a die
  May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• But, mousie, thou art no thy lane,
  In proving foresight may be vain:
  The best laid schemes o' mice an' men,
        Gang aft a-gly,
  An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
        For promis'd joy.
  • Robert Burns,To a Mouse, st. 7 (1785).

• You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.
  • J.B.S. Haldane On Being the Right Size

• A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
  With silver claws and silver eye
  • Walter de la Mare, Silver.

• Rats and mice are not generally regarded as pets, but as pests; they have few defenders. Yet the pain a rat or a mouse feels is every bit as real as that of any pet. In laboratories, they suffer, as anybody who has heard them moan, cry, whimper and even scream knows. The experimenters dissimulate about this by insisting that they are merely vocalising.
  • Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (London: Vintage, 1996. ISBN 0-09-947891-9, Conclusion, p. 217.

• We cannot model everything in the mouse. If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can't do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos.
  • Shoukhrat Mitalipov [Chimera Monkeys]

• Consider the little mouse, how sagacious an animal it is which never entrusts its life to one hole only.
  • Plautus, Truculentus, Act IV, sc. iv, l. 15.

• When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.

• • Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, Book VIII, Section 103.

• I think if she lived in
  A little shoe-house —
  That little old woman was
  Surely a mouse!
  • Beatrix Potter, The Old Woman.

• The city mouse lives in a house,
  The garden mouse lives in a bower
  • Christina Rossetti, The City Mouse and the Garden Mouse.

• Mice are the key model we use to study mammalian development and we extrapolate from mice to humans. This work tells us that the extrapolation can be unreliable. I’m not saying that all work in mice doesn’t apply in humans, but there are fundamental differences we need to be wary of.
  • Azim Surani [1]

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 533.

• I holde a mouses herte nat worth a leek.
  That hath but oon hole for to sterte to.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Paraphrase of the Prologue of The Wyves Tale of Bath, line 572.

• The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
  • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651); see Plautus, Trunculentus, IV, above.

• It had need to bee
  A wylie mouse that should breed in the cat's eare.
  • John Heywood, Proverbs, Part II, Chapter V.

• "Once on a time there was a mouse," quoth she,
  "Who sick of worldly tears and laughter, grew
  Enamoured of a sainted privacy;
  To all terrestrial things he bade adieu,
  And entered, far from mouse, or cat, or man,
  A thick-walled cheese, the best of Parmesan."
  • Lorenzo Pignotti, The Mouse Turned Hermit.

• The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole
  Can never be a mouse of any soul.
  • Alexander Pope, The Wife of Bath, Her Prologue, line 298.

• The mouse ne'er shunn'd the cat as thev did budge
  From rascals worse than they.
  • William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act I, scene 6, line 44.

Attributed

• If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
  • Desmond Tutu, (quoted in Ending Poverty As We Know It : Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at a Living Wage (2003) by William P. Quigley, p. 8)
• The early bird may catch the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
  • American proverb