Quotes about spring
page 7

“Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of [passenger] pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon”, p. 109.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"

Heart, Housing, Clothes

“The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes.”

Horace Greeley (1811–1872) American politician and publisher

Greeley on Lincoln (1893), edited by Joel Benton, p. 78.
1890s

Life, Suffering

“Had they ever thought of the parallel in the origins of Mohammedanism and Bolshevism—both springing out of Christianity, one proclaiming brotherhood and the other communism, but both proclaiming death and damnation upon all unbelievers. Within a century of the death of the prophet the Mohammedans had spread from Arabia to the Pyrenees by means of the sword and were stopped by Charles Martel at Tours. Russia throws up few great men but imagine what might happen if a Bolsehvik Peter the Great appeared on the scene.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (3 July 1932), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 43.
1932

Death, Men, Imagination, Communication

“You just call out my name
And you know wherever I am
I'll come running to see you again.
Winter, spring, summer, or fall
All you have to do is call
And I'll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You've got a friend.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

You've Got a Friend
Song lyrics, Tapestry (1971)

Winter, Summer

“The movement has indeed been slow, and not such as man would have expected; but it has been analogous to the great movements of God in His providence and in His works. So, if we may credit the geologists, has this earth reached its present state. So have moved on the great empires. So retribution follows crime. So rise the tides. So grows the tree with long intervals of repose and apparent death. So comes on the spring, with battling elements and frequent reverses, with snowbanks and violets, and, if we had no experience, we might be doubtful what the end would be. But we know that back of all this, beyond these fluctuations, away in the serene heavens, the sun is moving steadily on; that these very agitations of the elements and seeming reverses, are not only the sign, but the result of his approach, and that the full warmth and radiance of the summer noontide are sure to come. So, O Divine Redeemer, Sun of Righteousness, come Thou! So will He come. It may be through clouds and darkness and tempest; but the heaven where He is, is serene; He is "traveling in the greatness of His strength; "and as surely as the throne of God abides, we know He shall yet reach the height and splendor of the highest noon, and that the light of millennial glory shall yet flood the earth.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 418.

Death, God, Travel, Tree

“Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against Bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich's darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold that all had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last now firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.”

William Manchester (1922–2004) (April 1, 1922 – June 1, 2004) American author, journalist and historian

Source: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone 1932-1940 (1988), p. 688-689

Death, Hunger, War, Fear

“You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it—
Well, it was so I followed down this music,
Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry,
Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted,
Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Music, Star, Lying, Mood

“People see you one way and think, 'That's not her real thing, she's just putting that on now.' But that is! That's where my creativity really resides. Where it all springs. My characters are really bizarre. They're kind of dark and not really considered great people. It all comes from the same dark place, it's just filtered through comedy.”

Megan Mullally (1958) American actress

Attributed

People, Way, Thinking

“A thousand songs from a thousand boughs
The glad birds' pleasure declare;
The rills are laughing in crystal light—
For the presence of Spring is there.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(3rd March 1827) Birthday in Spring
The London Literary Gazette, 1827

Pleasure, Bird, Light

“Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.”

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

Malachi, in Act 3
The Matchmaker (1954)

“For roses also blossom on the thorn,
And the fair lily springs from loathsome weed.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Che de le spine ancor nascon le rose,
E d'una fetida erba nasce il giglio.
Canto XXVII, stanza 121 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

Love, Color, Christ

“Down on Spring Street, in a bar across the street from the secondhand store. With my last nickel I went there for a cup of coffee. an old style place, sawdust on the floor, crudely drawn nudes smeared across the walls. It was a saloon where old men gathered, where the beer was cheap and smelled sour, where the past remained unaltered.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Men, Coffee, Beer, Past

“It felt like spring time on this February morning
In a courtyard birds were singing your praise…”

Sophie B. Hawkins (1967) American musician

Whaler (1994), As I Lay Me Down

Bird, Singing, Time

“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925) United States Secretary of State

Cross of Gold Speech (1896)

Grass, Country

“The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring — as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

The Greek Anthology (p. 59)
Classics Revisited (1968)

“The child alone a poet is:
Spring and Fairyland are his.
Truth and Reason show but dim,
And all's poetry with him.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"Babylon"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Truth

“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Memories of President Lincoln, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star, Night

“Cutting the Spring Breeze
Throughout heaven and earth there is not a piece of ground where a single stick could be inserted;
I am glad that all things are void, myself and the world:
Honored be the sword, three feet long, wielded by the great Yüan swordsmen;
For it is like cutting a spring breeze in a flash of lightning.”

Mugaku Sogen (1226–1286)

Dumonlin Heinrich, ‎Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Essays in Zen Buddhism, first series. 2000.p. 255

World

“I must here acknowledge that the best naturall philosophic that I ever coulde learn in this point, was neither out of Aristotle's Physicks, nor Velcurie's Naturall Philosophy, nor garseous meteors, nor out of any of the olde philosophicall fathers, that writ so many hundred years past; but that little which I have, I gathered it on the backside of Moore fieldes, where, by sundrie undoubted argument, I did heare it maintained, that all the elementes doo onely differ in attenuation and condensation: so as earth beeing attenuated becommeth water; and water condensate, becommeth earth; water attenuated becommeth aier, and aier condensate becommeth water; and so likewise aier attenuated becommeth fire, and fire condensate becommeth aier; and thus all of them spring from one roote, which being admitted is a manifeste proofe that there is a greate and neere affinity betweene the lande and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Learning, Water, Bee, Past

“Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Letter to Coleridge 1790.

Heart

“I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Taliesin 1952"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

Love, Men, World, History

“I do not worship any gods myself, though I guess some are real in their own ways. I have to believe that all of them get regular belly-laughs because one of them was ingenious to create human sexuality. Even greed and lust for power do not come close to generating the stupidities that us being male and female do.
But by giving it half a thought I can think of as many glories that spring from the same dichotomy.”

Glen Cook book Bleak Seasons

Source: Bleak Seasons (1996), Chapter 98 (p. 266)

God, Stupidity, Way, Thinking

“If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 257-258

Love, Life, Women, Men

“The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 21. 1960s–1970s

Change, Time

“Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.”

Winston S. Churchill book The World Crisis

The World Crisis, 1916-1918 Part II : Chapter XXIII (Victory), Churchill, Butterworth (1927), p. 544.
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children, Freedom

“In a valley sweet with singing
From the hill and from the wood,
Where the green moss rills were springing,
A wondrous maiden stood.
The first lark seemed to carry
Her coming through the air;
Not long she wont to tarry,
Though she wandered none knew where.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette (10th January 1835) Versions from the German (Second Series.) 'The Coming of Spring'—Schiller.
Translations, From the German

Singing

“About a hundred and ninety-four feet away from our house [Gorky was born in Armenia] on the road to the spring, my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots, and porcupines had made their nests. There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of w:Paolo Ucello's painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking out their soft breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above this all stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold, and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don't know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through many years of the same ac, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h—h-sh—h of silver leaves of the poplars.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 124, (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 22,23

Women, People, Tear, Tree

“The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 1-2

Age, Imagination, Thinking, Sense

“You have drunk deep at the springs of western knowledge. While you will not hesitate to absorb for your benefit and for the national good the best elements in western culture and thought, you will not in any case permit the destruction of the vital elements of your own civilisation.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Bombay University Convocation on 17th August 1937.

Knowledge

“Skylark,
Have you seen a valley green with Spring
Where my heart can go a-journeying,
Over the shadows in the rain
To a blossom covered lane?
And in your lonely flight,
Haven't you heard the music in the night,
Wonderful music,
Faint as a will-o-the-wisp,
Crazy as a loon,
Sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.”

Johnny Mercer (1909–1976) American lyricist, songwriter, singer and music professional

Song "Skylark" (1942)

Sadness, Music, Heart, Night

“Arnold did not see Goyette again until fourteen years later, in 1989
Goyette says that the coupled renewed their relationship, meeting every spring
Goyette says the relationship continued generally no more than once a year until 1996”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

page 328 of "Fantastic" published 30 May 2006 https://books.google.ca/books?id=p_lPLwK8r0UC&pg=PA328 About

“True love fears no winter.
No, no!
Its spring is and ever remains.”

Ludwig Tieck Herbstlied

Die Liebe wintert nicht;
Nein! nein!
Ist und bleibt Fruhlingesschein.
"Herbstlied", line 22, from Friedrich Schiller (ed.), Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1799 (1798); translation from W. B. T., Every Morning (London: William Tegg, 1874), p. 71.

Love, Fear, Winter

“You know, when the season is over a lot of guys go home and eat peanuts and drink beer and they show up in spring training with a big belly. I will go home and start working on my body right away. My right shoulder is not the way it is supposed to be. I'm not going to wait until spring training and hope it is all right. I will work on it when I get home.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking during the 1971 World Series, as quoted in The Chicago Tribune by Bob Markus, reprinted in I'll Play These: From Ecstacy to Angst, A Sports Writer’s Journey https://books.google.com/books?id=sdzKAmeIoE8C&pg=PA219 (2011), p. 219 Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1971</big>

Hope, Way, Guy, Home

“When Spring is old, and dewy winds
Blow from the south, with odors sweet,
I see my love, in shadowy groves,
Speed down dark aisles on shining feet.”

Maurice Thompson (1844–1901) American novelist

Atalanta’s Race.

Love, Speed

“Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires. For a time after joining his life to hers, and putting on civilian dress, he had felt all the delight of freedom in general, of which he had known nothing before, and of freedom in his love — and he was content, but not for long. He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires — longing. Without conscious intention he began to clutch at every passing caprice, taking it for a desire and an object.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (1875–1877; 1878)

Love, Life, Men, Happiness

“The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.”

Saul D. Alinsky (1909–1972) American community organizer and writer

Source: Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971), p. xxiv

World, Faith, Religion, Democracy

“In the spring of 1920, General Motors found itself, as it appeared at the moment, in a good position. On account of the limitation of automotive production during the war there was a great shortage of cars. Every car that could be produced was produced and could be sold at almost any price. So far as any one could see, there was no reason why that prosperity should not continue for a time at least. I liken our position then to a big ship in the ocean. We were sailing along at full speed, the sun was shining, and there was no cloud in the sky that would indicate an approaching storm. Many of you have, of course, crossed the ocean and you can visualize just that sort of a picture yet what happened? In September of that year, almost over night, values commenced to fall. The liquidation from the inflated prices resulting from the war had set in. Practically all schedules or a large part of them were cancelled. Inventory commenced to roll in, and, before it was realized what was happening, this great ship of ours was in the midst of a terrific storm. As a matter of fact, before control could be obtained General Motors found itself in a position of having to go to its bankers for loans aggregating $80,000,000 and although, as we look at things from today's standpoint, that isn't such a very large amount of money, yet when you must have $80,000,000 and haven't got it, it becomes an enormous sum of money, and if we had not had the confidence and support of the strongest banking interests our ship could never have weathered the storm.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 185-6; Retrospective vein President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., addressing the automobile editors of American newspapers at the Proving Ground at Milford, Michigan in 1927.

Money, War, Cars, Confidence

“Special qualities are required of the essayist. A poem or a novel may spring from the inner consciousness of an author.. reasoning poers must be brought to reinforce imagination.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

The Catholic Fireside Articles November 1924 Gillian Lindsay - The Story of the Lark Rise Writer 1990 ISBN 9781873855539
Literary Observations

Imagination

“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Life, Happiness, Nature, Knowledge

“Youth is like spring, an overpraised season.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 6

Youth, Season

“The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is "fascist."”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

Source: 2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003), p. 156

“All fanaticism springs from the religious impulse.”

Edmund Cooper book Seed of Light

Seed of Light (1959)

“Jahangir in the seventeenth century confessed that “the number of the turbulent and the disaffected never seems to diminish; for what with the examples made during the reign of my father, and subsequently of my own, …there is scarcely a province in the empire in which, in one quarter or the other, some accursed miscreant will not spring up to unfurl the standard of rebellion; so that in Hindustan never has there existed a period of complete repose.””

Jahangir (1569–1627) 4th Mughal Emperor

Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi, trs. Price, 225-26. quoted from Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 6

“All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 145 (See also: Rene Girard)

“An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

My Literary Passions (1895)

God, Beauty

“I divined and chose a distant place to dwell
T'ien T'ai: what more is there to say?
Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring
By now I am used to doing without the world
Picking ferns I pass the years that are left”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

World, Color, Grass, Distant

“The schools, having found the object of their long, blind searching, shall teach directness, simplicity, naturalness: they shall protect the young against palpable illusion. They shall teach that, while man once invented a process called composition, Nature has forever brought forth organisms. They shall encourage the love of Nature that wells up in every childish heart, and shall not suppress, shall not stifle, the teeming imagination of the young.
They shall teach, as the result of their own bitter experience, that conscious mental effort, that conscious emotionality, are poor mates to breed from, and that true parturition comes of a deep, instinctive, subconscious desire. That true art, springing fresh from Nature, must have in it, to live, much of the glance of an eye, much of the sound of a voice, much of the life of a life.
That Nature is strong, generous, comprehensive, fecund, subtile: that in growth and decadence she continually sets forth the drama of man's life.
That, thro' the rotating seasons, thro' the procession of the years, thro' the march of the centuries, permeating all, sustaining all, there murmurs the still, small voice of a power that holds us in the hollow of its hand.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)

Love, Life, School, Art

“Many of the environmentalists who moved into the environmental movement after Silent Spring … detested pollution and craved purity. Absolute purity. They wanted to enforce zero tolerance on all environmental pollutants, not just on carcinogens. With friends like these the environment needs no enemies.”

Garrett Hardin (1915–2003) American ecologist

Filters Against Folly (1985)

“I suddenly remember the distance that I must travel;
I spring from bed and look out to see the time.
The stars and planets are all grown dim in the sky;
Long, long is the road; I cannot stay.
I am going on service, away to the battle-ground,
And I do not know when I shall come back.
I hold your hand with only a deep sigh;
Afterwards, tears—in the days when we are parted.
With all your might enjoy the spring flowers,
But do not forget the time of our love and pride.”

Su Wu

To His Wife (c. 100 BC); written when Su Wu was called to battle against the Hsiung-nu; on parting from his wife.
Translated by Arthur Waley, in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), p. 73

Love, Travel, Star, Flowers

“Flowers fade and fly, and flying fill the sky;
Their bloom departs, their perfume gone, yet who stands pitying by? …
Oh, let me sadly bury them beside these steps to-night! …
Farewell, dear flowers, for ever now, thus buried as 'twas best,
I have not yet divined when I with you shall sink to rest.
I who can bury flowers like this a laughing-stock shall be;
I cannot say in days to come what hands shall bury me.
See how when spring begins to fail each opening floweret fades;
So too there is a time of age and death for beauteous maids;
And when the fleeting spring is gone, and days of beauty o'er,
Flowers fall, and lovely maidens die, and both are known no more.”

Herbert Giles book A History of Chinese Literature

"The Hung Lou Mêng", p. 368
A History of Chinese Literature (1901)

Love, Death, Age, Beauty

“Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower;
Her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew,
Is either the tip of earth's Jade Mountain,
Or a moon-edged roof of paradise.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"A Song Of Pure Happiness I" (清平调之一)

Mountain, Flowers

“In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Stanzas to Augusta (1816), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Bird, Solitude, Tree, Singing

“In spring's own country, where the gardens blow,
You faded, tender rose! For hours now past,
Like butterflies departing, on you're cast
The worms of memories to work you woe.”

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) Polish national poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and polit…

"The Grave of the Countess Potocki" http://daisy.htmlplanet.com/amick.htm Crimean Sonnets

Memory, Past, Country

“[Youth] is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Youth, Way, Help, Animals

“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

Beauty, Idea, Effort, Tree

“Flowers, the sole luxury which nature knew,
In Eden's pure and guiltless garden grew—
Gay without toil, and lovely without art,
They spring to cheer the sense, and glad the heart.”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author

Poems (1773), "To a Lady, with some painted Flowers", p. 96.

Love, Art, Flowers, Nature

“And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean —
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Source: The Rubaiyat (1120)

Love

“Birds the more white, against green stream
Blooms burst to flame, against blue hills
I glance, the spring is gone again.
What day, what day, can I go home?”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"A Quatrain" (trans. Jerome P. Seaton), in Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, eds. Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo (1975), p. 142

Home, Bird

“Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more;
I mourn, but you woodlands I mourn not for you!
For spring is returning your charms to restore,
Perfumed with fresh fragrance and glittering with dew.
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn,
Kind nature the embryo blossom shall save;
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?”

James Beattie (1735–1803) Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher

The Hermit

Love, Nature, Winter, Night

“In a stroke of imaginative genius our understanding of consciousness was radically transformed, but in an entirely unexpected way. Critical clues came from diffuse nerve nets and, even more extraordinarily, plant neurobiology. Banished forever was the idea that the brain alone was the seat of consciousness. Rather, it is an 'antenna' embedded in a hyperdimensional matrix. The depths of reality are only now being uncovered, but now the springs of imagination, intuition, abstraction and even pre-cognition are revealed. What was once called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics was simply a clue to a superbly structured universe where mind is an integral component, instantiated at the big bang or maybe even before? Future exploration offers dizzying prospects, but we are not the first to venture forth. Far in advance of the emergence of human consciousness, innumerable galactic civilisations had slipped into what we now call the Mortimer Manifold.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

"King of Sweden" presenting "Professor Mortimer" with the 2056 Nobel prize, in "Simon Conway Morris forecasts the future" at NewScientist.com (15 November 2006) http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/science-forecasts/dn10477-simon-conway-morris-forecasts-the-future.html.

Way, Imagination, Mathematics, Idea

“As well as the greatest optimist I see the lark soaring in the spring air, but I also see a young girl of about twenty, who might have been in good health, a victim to consumption, and who will perhaps drown herself before she dies of an illness. If one is always in respectable company among rather well-to-do bourgeois one does not notice this so much perhaps, but if one has dined for years on 'la vache enragee', as I did, one cannot deny that great misery is a fact that weighs down the scale.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Antwerp Belgium, Winter 1886; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 453), p. 38 1880s, 1886

Health, Girl

“Burglars! Good gracious!' cried the little woman, springing from the bed in one bound. The word 'burglar' was a terrible one to her, as it is indeed, to every well-constituted woman. 'Robbery' does not sound nearly so awe-inspiring.”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Loveridge Burglary" (1900)
Short stories

“I see them, crowd on crowd they walk the earth,
Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;
No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,
Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Dead

God, Autumn, Tree, Appearance

“No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity that marked the Maryland May. He loved it too much, as though it were Greek and half human.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Love, Passion

“Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in everything.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" The May Magnificat http://www.bartleby.com/122/18.html", stanza 4 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Question

“The Night is Mother of the Day,
The Winter of the Spring,
And ever upon old Decay
The greenest mosses cling.”

John Greenleaf Whittier A Dream of Summer

A Dream of Summer, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Winter, Night

“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.130

Death, Light, Winter, Time

“And so with us, she thought. We come, we go, and, as individuals, we are forgotten. But the stream of human life goes on, ever changing, but ever the same, and as the stream is fed by well-springs hoarded by Nature so the stream of humanity is fed by the store of accumulated wisdom and effort and hard-won experience of past generations.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Concluding paragraph to novel
Still Glides the Stream

Life, Wisdom, Nature, Effort

“Here appears a child plainly not normal, what shall we do with him? Shall we, as some have advocated, even from Spartan days, hold that the weaklings should be destroyed? No. In cultivating plant life, while we destroy much that is unfit, we are constantly on the lookout for what has been called the abnormal, that which springs apart in new lines. How many plants are there in the world to-day that were not in one sense once abnormalities? No; it is the influence of cultivation, of selection, of surroundings, of environment, that makes the change from the abnormal to the normal. From the children we are led to call abnormal, may come, under wise cultivation and training, splendid normal natures.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Life, Children, World, Nature

“Adieu, the city's ceaseless hum,
The haunts of sensual life, adieu!
Green fields, and silent glens we come,
To spend this bright spring-day with you.Whether the hills and vales shall gleam
With beauty, is for us to choose;
For leaf and blossom, rock and stream,
Are coloured with the spirit's hues.Here, to the seeking soul, is brought
A nobler view of human fate,
And higher feeling, higher thought,
And glimpses of a higher state.Through change of time, on sea and shore,
Serenely nature smiles away;
Yon infinite blue sky bends o'er
Our world, as at the primal day.The self-renewing earth is moved
With youthful life each circling year;
And flowers that Ceres' daughter loved
At Enna, now are blooming here.Glad nature will this truth reveal,
That God is ours and we are His.
O friends, my friends! what joy to feel
That He our loving Father is!”

James Aldrich (1810–1856) American editor and minor poet

A Spring-Day Walk.

Love, Life, God, Fate

“Spring is in the air. In some places, that means longer days, blooming flowers and Opening Day. Here in New Jersey, the coming of spring means it’s the time of year when Trenton politicians ask us for more money. Not surprisingly, this year is no different.”

Tom Kean, Jr. (1968) Member of the New Jersey General Assembly and State Senate

On Jon Corzine's Budget (April 6, 2006); "The Corzine Budget: Same Old Tax and Spend ", Tom's Blog" (April 6, 2006) http://tomkean.com/today/index.cfm?e=user.about.blog&messageID=76.

Money, Flowers, Time

“Again I only gave numbers [of her art-works, she sent for the next Sturm-exhibition]. I stick to my idea of not giving titles... Titles are really disgusting romantic, and now in a while people will have hundreds of Spring's, Summers, Trees [paintings], to Liebknecht, Eberts, etc.. Above everything color and line have their own specific language, which doesn't want to be captured in a title.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from German, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(original version, written by Jacoba in German:) Ich habe wieder nur Nummern gegeben. Ich bleibe bei meiner Idee, keine Titel zu geben. .. ..Titel sinds o widerlich romantisch, und jetz wird man in einiger Zeit hunderte Frühlings, Sommer, Bäume, an Liebknechts, Eberts und so weiter haben. Farbe und Linien haben für alle eine verschiedene eigene Sprache, die nicht im Titel festgelegt werden woll.
in a letter to Herwarth Walden, 14 Jan. 1920; as cited in the catalogue Der Sturm, Herwarth Walden und die Europäische Avantgarde, Berlin 1912-1932 Taschenbuch – 1961
Already in 1914 Jacoba started to number her paintings and drawings
1920's

People, Art, Color, Idea

“The moral government of God, springing from the Divine Love, is a government by moral agencies purely. It relies utterly on the operation of the powers native to the soul itself; and leaving aside all the juridical enginery of reward and punishment, it lets his sun shine and his rain fall alike on the just and on the unjust, that the cause of God may everywhere win simply upon its merits.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.258

Love, God, Soul, Sun

“As the birds do love the spring,
Or the bees their careful king”

Henry Constable (1562–1613) English poet

Diaphenia

Love, Bird, Bee

“I do love violets:
They tell the history of woman's love;
They open with the earliest breath of spring;
Lead a sweet life of perfume, dew, and light;
And, if they perish, perish with a sigh
Delicious as that life.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Roland's Tower
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love, Life, History, Light

“Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 2, st. 2-3.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

“The East and the West in the spring of the world shall blend
As a man and a woman that plight
Their troth in the warm spring night.”

Richard Hovey (1864–1900) American writer

"Spring", p. 61. Compare: "Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet", Rudyard Kipling.
Along the Trail (1898)

World, Night

“1. Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.
2. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
3. Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind.
4. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
5. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
6. Laughter is the emotion of tragic delight.
7. Laughter is the female of Tragedy.
8. Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.
9. Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.
10. Laughter is the mind sneezing.
11. Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.
12. Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

"Inferior Religions" (1917), cited from Lawrence Rainey (ed.) Modernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) pp. 208-9.

Fish, Laughter, Strong, Animals

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVII.

Faith, Soul

“Florentine had grown more or less immune to the charms of spring.”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 246

“The death of Black Jade coincided with the wedding hour of Pao-yu and Precious Virtue. Shortly after Snow Duck was taken to the wedding chambers, Black Jade had regained consciousness. During this lucid moment, which was not unlike the afterglow of the setting sun, she took Purple Cuckoo's hand and said to her with an effort, "My hour is here. You have served me for many years, and I had hoped that we should be together the rest of our lives… but I am afraid…"
The effort exhausted her and she fell back, panting. She still held Purple Cuckoo's hand and continued after a while, "Mei-mei, I have only one wish. I have no attachment here. After my death, tell them to send my body back to the south––"
She stopped again, and her eyes closed slowly. Purple Cuckoo felt her mistress' hand tighten over hers. Knowing this was a sign of the approaching end, she sent for Li Huan, who had gone back to her own apartment for a brief rest. When the latter returned with Quest Spring, Black Jade's hands were already cold and her eyes dull. They suppressed their sobs and hastened to dress her. Suddenly Black Jade cried, "Pao-yu, Pao-yu, how––" Those were her last words.
Above their own lamentations, Li Huan, Purple Cuckoo, and Quest Spring thought they heard the soft notes of an ethereal music in the sky. They went out to see what it was, but all they could hear was the rustling of the wind through the bamboos and all they could see was the shadow of the moon creeping down the western wall.”

Wang Chi-chen (1899–2001)

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (1958), p. 307

Death, Hope, Music, Effort

“Most events spring from causes equally small: we are unacquainted with them because most historians have been themselves ignorant of them, or have not had eyes capable of perceiving them. It is true, that, in this respect, the mind may repair their omissions; for the knowledge of certain principles easily compensates the lack of knowledge of certain facts.”

Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) French philosopher

La plupart des évènements ont des causes aussi petites. Nous les ignorons, parce que la plupart des historiens les ont ignorées eux-mêmes, ou parce qu’ils n’ont pas eu d’yeux pour les appercevoir. Il est vrai qu’à cet égard l’esprit peut réparer leurs omissions : la connoissance de certains principes supplée facilement à la connoissance de certains faits.
Essay III, Chapter I
De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties (1758)

Knowledge

“As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952, and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

1970s, The Humble Programmer (1972)

Country

“Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Sermon VII : Outward and Inward Morality
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)

Love, Life, God, Nature

“Economic growth springs from better recipes, not just from more cooking. New recipes produce fewer unpleasant side effects and generate more economic value per unit of raw material.”

Paul Romer (1955) American economist

As quoted in "World Bank confirms NYU's Romer as next chief economist" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-worldbank-economist-idUSKCN0ZZ05A Reuters. July 18, 2016.

Cooking

“I won't play ball in the winter. I gonna rest. If the pain is still there, I won't come back to spring training. I don't want to play the way I play now. I can't do nothing. That's like I steal money from the club.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Speaking with George Kiseda of The Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph in late July or early August 1957, reproduced in "Frustration in the Fifties" https://books.google.com/books?id=03XsO25A3I8C&pg=PA63&lpg=PA63&dq=%22I+won't+come+back+to+spring+training%22&source=bl&ots=xfn30GlAmb&sig=9pGIiE3gGIwAp6QroqRbNPygCjM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjo37rStb7NAhWGdT4KHSxjDCcQ6AEIFDAA#v=onepage&q&f=false, from Roberto Clemente: The Great One (1997) by Bruce Markusen, p. 63 Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1957</big>

Money, Pain, Way, Winter