"I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey." (Homer, "The Iliad" cca. 750–700 BC)
"No one can count the terrors that the earth spawns, catastrophic, gruesome, and the vast arms of the sea swarm with brute monsters bent on harm, and everywhere between the sky and ground lights bloom by day in flares and sudden bolts; and birds and beasts alike can tell of the whirlwind's whirling wrath." (Aeschylus, "The Oresteia", 458 BC)
"What a swarm of sophists you lot have swirled up!" (Archilochoi, "The Archilochuses", cca. 448 BC)
"Either all things proceed from one intelligent source and come together as in one body, and the part ought not to find fault with what is done for the benefit of the whole; or there are only atoms, and nothing else than a mixture and dispersion. Why, then, art thou disturbed? Say to this ruling faculty, Art thou dead, art thou corrupted, art thou playing the hypocrite, art thou become a beast, dost thou herd and feed with the rest?" (Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations". cca. 121–180 AD
"What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee." (Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations", cca. 161–180)
"A writer must make up his mind to the possible rough treatment of the critics, who swarm like bacteria whenever there is any literary material on which they can feed." (Oliver W Holmes, "Over the Teacups", 1891)
"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." (Herbert G Wells, "The War of the Worlds", 1898)
"There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony." (Emil M. Cioran, "The Fall into Time", 1964)
"Number theory swarms with bugs, waiting to bite the tempted flower-lovers who, once bitten, are inspired to excesses of effort!" (Barry Mazur, "Number Theory as Gadfly", Amer. Math. Monthly 98, 1991
"Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey." (Orson Scott Card, "How Software Companies Die", Windows Sources: The Magazine for Windows Experts, 1995)
"Perspective [is] a luxury when your head [is] constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.” (Khaled Hosseini)
"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters." (Charles Baudelaire)
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