Cattle

The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising:
There are forty feeding like one!

Cattle (colloquially cows) are the most common type of large domesticated ungulates. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae, are the most widespread species of the genus Bos, and are most commonly classified collectively as Bos primigenius. Cattle are raised as livestock for meat (beef and veal), as dairy animals for milk and other dairy products, and as draft animals (pulling carts, plows and the like). Other products include leather and dung for manure or fuel. In some countries, such as India, cattle are sacred. It is estimated that there are 1.3 billion cattle in the world today.

Sourced

• The cattle upon a thousand hills.
  • Psalms, line 10, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 30.

• The cattle are grazing,
  Their heads never raising:
  There are forty feeding like one!
  • William Wordsworth, The Cock is Crowing, written in March while on the bridge, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 30.

Cows

• God sends a curst cow short horns.
  • William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598), Act 2, Scene 1
  • Variant: A curst cow hath short horns.
    • George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).
  • Note: "Curst" here refers to being ill-tempered, and "short horns" to being ineffectual, as illustrated by this earliest known example:
    • Often lacke of myght asswagyth cruelnes
      To a wylde cowe god doth short hornys sende
      Wrath is great foly, where myght may nat extende
      • Alexander Barclay (1509), Ship of Fools, i, 182; adapted in English from Sebastian Brant's German book of the same title (1494).

• A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.
  • Samuel Johnson, reported in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1772).

• The friendly cow all red and white,
  I love with all my heart:
  She gives me cream with all her might
  To eat with apple-tart.
  • Robert Louis Stevenson A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), The Cow.

• I warrant you lay abed till the cows came home.
  • Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversations (c. 1738), Dialog. 2.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 145.

• I never saw a Purple Cow,
  I never hope to see one;
  But I can tell you, anyhow
  * I'd rather see than be one.
  • Gelett Burgess, The Purple Cow.

• The Moo-cow-moo's got a tail like a rope
  En it's ravelled down where it grows,
  En it's just like feeling a piece of soap
  All over the moo-cow's nose.
  • Edmund Vance Cooke, The Moo-Cow-Moo.

• You may rezoloot till the cows come home.
  • John Hay, Little Breeches, Banty Tim.

• Thank you, pretty cow, that made
  Pleasant milk to soak my bread.
  • Anne Taylor, The Cow.

Bulls

• Bullfight critics row on row
  Crowd the vast arena full
  But only one man’s there who knows
  And he's the man who fights the bull.
  • Quoted in a letter to the editor by Representative F. Edward Hébert, chairman of the House Committee on Armed Services, who said, "President Kennedy was fond of quoting some lines from the Spanish poet García Lorca". Reported in The Washington Post (April 11, 1971), p. C7. These lines are believed not to be García Lorca's.

Oxen

• The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib.
  • Isaiah, I, 3.

• Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.
  • Samuel Johnson, parody on "Who rules o'er freemen should himself be free," from Henry Brooke's Earl of Essex. In Boswell's Life of Johnson (1784).

• As an ox goeth to the slaughter.
  • Proverbs, VII, 22. Jeremiah, XI, 19.

• And the plain ox,
  That harmless, honest, guileless animal,
  In what has he offended? he whose toil,
  Patient and ever ready, clothes the land
  With all the pomp of harvest.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons (1726-1730).