Quotes about spring
page 8

John Constable photo

“And however one's mind may be elevated, and kept us to what is excellent, by the works of the Great Masters — still Nature is the fountain's head, the source from whence all originally must spring — and should an artist continue his practice without referring to nature he must soon form a manner, & be reduced to the same deplorable situation as the French painter mentioned by Sir J. Reynolds, who told him that he had long ceased to look at nature for she only put him out.For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind — but have neither endeavoured to make my performances look as if really executed by other men….. There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth.I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

3 quotes in Constable's letter to John Dunthorne (29 May 1802), from John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), part 2, pp. 31-32
1800s - 1810s

Torquato Tasso photo

“O heavenly Muse, that not with fading bays
Deckest thy brow by the Heliconian spring,
But sittest crowned with stars' immortal rays
In Heaven, where legions of bright angels sing;
Inspire life in my wit, my thoughts upraise,
My verse ennoble, and forgive the thing,
If fictions light I mix with truth divine,
And fill these lines with other praise than thine.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

O Musa, tu, che di caduchi allori
Non circondi la fronte in Elicona,
Ma su nel Cielo infra i beati cori
Hai di stelle immortali aurea corona;
Tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori,
Tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona
S'intesso fregj al ver, s'adorno in parte
D'altri diletti, che de' tuoi le carte.
Canto I, stanza 2 (tr. Edward Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Lanxi Daolong photo
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt photo
Felix Adler photo
Edward Gibbon photo

“On the approach of spring I withdraw without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. i. p. 116.
Memoirs (1796)

John Foxe photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Enoch Powell photo
Alex Haley photo

“Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.”

Alex Haley (1921–1992) African American biographer, screenwriter, and novelist

Source: Roots : The Saga of an American Family (1976), Ch. 1, first lines.

Samuel Johnson photo

“From Thee, great God: we spring, to Thee we tend,
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 257

Rose Wilder Lane photo
George Chapman photo

“Mourne not inevitable things; thy teares can spring no deeds
To helpe thee, nor recall thy sonne: impacience ever breeds
Ill upon ill, makes worst things worse.”

George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator

Book XXIV, line 494, p. 336
The Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (1611)

Richard Blackmore photo
John Banville photo
Noel Coward photo

“I'll see you again,
Whenever spring breaks through again.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

"I'll See You Again," Bitter Sweet, Act 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=ICVHprNgia8C&q=%22I'll+see+you+again+whenever+spring+breaks+through+again%22&pg=PA229#v=onepage

Charles Lyell photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Carlos Zambrano photo

“I don't think about that. I will think about that when I have the trophy in my hands. I just said that in spring training, and I'll just let it happen. You can see [Johan] Santana has like a four-something earned-run average. That's not Santana. At the end of the season, you'll see what Santana is capable of doing.”

Carlos Zambrano (1981) Venezuelan baseball pitcher

Sullivan, Paul, Zambrano remains sharp against Cards http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/cs-070428cubsgamer,1,5520199.story?coll=cs-cubs-headlines, Chicago Tribune, Retrieved on June 16, 2007
2007

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
James Fallows photo

“E'en here the tear of pity springs,
And hearts are touched by human things.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 23

Rachel Carson photo
Mark Tobey photo
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester photo
Jacob Bronowski photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
James Hamilton photo

“The truth is the Tree of Life knows no seasons. High up among its branches spring warbles all the year; and they are only the poor pensioners underneath who count the months, and tell an autumn and a winter.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 526.

Oliver Goldsmith photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Jean-François Revel photo
Vitruvius photo

“Every hot spring has healing properties because it has been boiled with foreign substances, and thus acquires a new useful quality.”

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter III, Sec. 4

John Townsend Trowbridge photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Adelaide Anne Procter photo
Charles-François Daubigny photo

“I have bought at Auverse thirty perches of land, all covered with beans, on which I shall plant some legs of mutton when you come to see me. They are building me a studio there, some eight by six meters, with several rooms around it, which will serve me, I hope, next Spring [of 1861]. Father Corot has found Auvers very fine, and has engaged me to fix myself there for a part of the year, wishing to make rustic landscapes with figures. I shall be truly well of there, in the midst of a good farming country, where the ploughs do not yet go by steam.”

Charles-François Daubigny (1817–1878) French painter

Quote in his letter to his friend Frédéric Henriet, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric+Henriet&title=Special:Search&go=Go&searchToken=dt4h140y68u3oxynlcr55rftr#/media/File:Eaux-fortes._(Frontispiece)_(NYPL_b12616975-1690388).jpg, 1860; as cited in 'Charles-francois Daubigny', by Robert J. Wichenden, in The Century Illustrated Montly Magazine, Vol. XLIV, July 1892, p. 335
Daubigny bought property in Auvers-sur-Oise in 1860; four years later Corot would decorate there his Villa des Vallées, with beautiful murals.
1840s - 1850s

Tom Lehrer photo

“All the world seems in tune
On a spring afternoon,
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park.
Every Sunday you'll see
My sweetheart and me,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Poisoning Pigeons in the Park"
An Evening (Wasted) With Tom Lehrer (1959)

Viktor Schauberger photo

“The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates. More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Water Wizard
Variant: "The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of Life, is water. In every drop of water dwells the Godhead, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the "First" substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates. More energy is encapsulated in every drop of good spring water than an average-sized PowerStation is presently able to produce."

Rachel Carson photo
Pablo Casals photo
John Calvin photo

“We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure…. We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities…. all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement…. they are always spattered and befouled with many stains…. it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

In John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, 1989, William J. Bouwsma, Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0195059514 ISBN 9780195059519, p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADdQiBaLW_kC&pg=PA36&dq=%22We+take+nothing+from+the+womb+but+pure+filth+%22&hl=en&ei=iu9lTJbUNsL48AbKt92DCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20take%20nothing%20from%20the%20womb%20but%20pure%20filth%20%22&f=false

Steven Erikson photo
Louis Hémon photo
Adelaide Anne Procter photo

“I do not ask that flowers should always spring
Beneath my feet
I know too well the poison and the sting
Of things too sweet.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Per Pacem ad Lucem".
A Chaplet of Verses (1862)

Edmund Burke photo

“Falsehood has a perennial spring.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

First Speech on the Conciliation with America (1774)

John Dewey photo
Will Eisner photo
Edmund Blunden photo
James Beattie photo

“But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn?
Oh when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?”

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

The Hermit

Neal A. Maxwell photo
Birju Maharaj photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Omar Khayyám photo

“Oh could I fly, I'd fly with thee!
We'd make with joyful wing
Our annual visit o'er the globe,
Companions of the spring.”

John Logan (1748–1788) Scottish minister and historian

To the Cuckoo, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Alexej von Jawlensky photo
Shona Brown photo
Boris Sidis photo
Silius Italicus photo

“When Hannibal's eyes were sated with the picture of all that valour, he saw next a marvellous sight—the sea suddenly flung upon the land with the mass of the rising deep, and no encircling shores, and the fields inundated by the invading waters. For, where Nereus rolls forth from his blue caverns and churns up the waters of Neptune from the bottom, the sea rushes forward in flood, and Ocean, opening his hidden springs, rushes on with furious waves. Then the water, as if stirred to the depths by the fierce trident, strives to cover the land with the swollen sea. But soon the water turns and glides back with ebbing tide; and then the ships, robbed of the sea, are stranded, and the sailors, lying on their benches, await the waters' return. It is the Moon that stirs this realm of wandering Cymothoe and troubles the deep; the Moon, driving her chariot through the sky, draws the sea this way and that, and Tethys follows with ebb and flow.”
Postquam oculos varia implevit virtutis imago, mira dehinc cernit: surgentis mole profundi injectum terris subitum mare nullaque circa litora et infuso stagnantis aequore campos. nam qua caeruleis Nereus evoluitur antris atque imo freta contorquet Neptunia fundo, proruptum exundat pelagus, caecosque relaxans Oceanus fontis torrentibus ingruit undis. tum uada, ceu saevo penitus permota tridenti, luctantur terris tumefactum imponere pontum. mox remeat gurges tractoque relabitur aestu, ac ratis erepto campis deserta profundo, et fusi transtris expectant aequora nautae. Cymothoes ea regna vagae pelagique labores Luna mouet, Luna, immissis per caerula bigis, fertque refertque fretum, sequiturque reciproca Tethys.

Postquam oculos varia implevit virtutis imago,
mira dehinc cernit: surgentis mole profundi
injectum terris subitum mare nullaque circa
litora et infuso stagnantis aequore campos.
nam qua caeruleis Nereus evoluitur antris
atque imo freta contorquet Neptunia fundo,
proruptum exundat pelagus, caecosque relaxans
Oceanus fontis torrentibus ingruit undis.
tum uada, ceu saevo penitus permota tridenti,
luctantur terris tumefactum imponere pontum.
mox remeat gurges tractoque relabitur aestu,
ac ratis erepto campis deserta profundo,
et fusi transtris expectant aequora nautae.
Cymothoes ea regna vagae pelagique labores
Luna mouet, Luna, immissis per caerula bigis,
fertque refertque fretum, sequiturque reciproca Tethys.
Book III, lines 45–60
Punica

Pierre-Auguste Renoir photo
George Herbert photo

“Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Virtue, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
Henry James photo
Clarence Thomas photo
Cesar Chavez photo
Adam Smith photo

“In the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which, in spite of all our care, are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. …
But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire, when in better health and in better humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect. Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and economy of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it, in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand, and beautiful, and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part IV

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Beautiful language! Love's peculiar, own,
But only to the spring and summer known.”

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

The Oriental Nosegay. By Pickersgill
The Troubadour (1825)

Henry David Thoreau photo
Kenji Miyazawa photo

“In spring I stopped eating the bodies of living things. Nonetheless, the other day I ate several slices of tuna sashimi as a form of magic to “undertake” my “communication” with “society.” I also stirred a cup of chawanmushi with a spoon. If the fish, while being eaten, had stood behind me and watched, what would he have thought? “I gave up my only life and this person is eating my body as if it were something distasteful.” “He’s eating me in anger.” “He’s eating me out of desperation.” “He’s thinking of me and, while quietly savoring my fat with his tongue, praying, ‘Fish, you will come with me as my companion some day, won’t you?’” “Damn! He’s eating my body!” Well, different fish would have had different thoughts. … Suppose I were the fish, and suppose that not only I were being eaten but my father were being eaten, my mother were being eaten, and my sister were also being eaten. And suppose I were behind the people eating us, watching. “Oh, look, that man has torn apart my sibling with chopsticks. Talking to the person next to him, he swallowed her, thinking nothing of it. Just a few minutes ago her body was lying there, cold. Now she must be disintegrating in a pitch-dark place under the influence of mysterious enzymes. Our entire family have given up our precious lives that we value, we’ve sacrificed them, but we haven’t won a thimbleful of pity from these people.””

Kenji Miyazawa (1896–1933) Japanese poet and author of children's literature

I must have been once a fish that was eaten.
Letter to Hosaka (May 1918); as quoted in Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato (University of California Press, 2007), pp. 12 https://books.google.it/books?id=D7IwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA12-13.

Gwendolyn Brooks photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Thomas Gray photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“TO-MORROW, to-morrow, thou loveliest May,
To-morrow will rise up thy first-born day;
Bride of the summer, child of the spring,
To-morrow the year will its favourite bring:”

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

The Golden Violet - title poem - introduction
The Golden Violet (1827)

Helen Keller photo
Wang Wei photo

“In the mountains a night of rain,
And above the trees a hundred springs.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

As quoted in Lin Yutang's My Country and My People (1936), p. 247

Robert Jordan photo
Mo Yan photo
Francesco Berni photo

“From one disorder oft a hundred spring.”

Francesco Berni (1497–1535) Italian poet

XL, 1
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato

Margaret Thatcher photo

“The spirit of the South Atlantic was the spirit of Britain at her best. It has been said that we surprised the world, that British patriotism was rediscovered in those spring days. Mr. President, it was never really lost.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (8 October 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105032
First term as Prime Minister

Italo Calvino photo
William Wordsworth photo

“She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:”

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, st. 1 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Vitruvius photo
Nile Kinnick photo
Fyodor Tyutchev photo

“On the Indian front, [the Hindutva movement] should spearhead the revival, rejuvenation and resurgence of Hinduism, which includes not only religious, spiritual and cultural practices springing from Vedic or Sanskritic sources, but from all other Indian sources independently of these: the practices of the Andaman islanders and the (pre-Christian) Nagas are as Hindu in the territorial sense, and Sanâtana in the spiritual sense, as classical Sanskritic Hinduism. (…) A true Hindutvavadi should feel a pang of pain, and a desire to take positive action, not only when he hears that the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population is falling due to a coordination of various factors, or that Hindus are being discriminated against in almost every respect, but also when he hears that the Andamanese races and languages are becoming extinct; that vast tracts of forests, millions of years old, are being wiped out forever; that ancient and mediaeval Hindu architectural monuments are being vandalised, looted or fatally neglected; that priceless ancient documents are being destroyed or left to rot and decay; that innumerable forms of arts and handicrafts, architectural styles, plant and animal species, musical forms and musical instruments, etc. are becoming extinct; that our sacred rivers and environment are being irreversibly polluted and destroyed…”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Talageri in S.R. Goel (ed.): Time for Stock-Taking, p.227-228.

Thomas Nashe photo

“Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant King,
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug, jug, pu wee, to witta woo!”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 161-164.

Jonah Goldberg photo

“Now Spring returns; but not to me returns.”

Michael Bruce (1746–1767) Scottish poet and hymnist

"Elegy on Spring" (1767), line 1.

Jane Roberts photo
Carl Linnaeus photo

“The Lord himself hath led him with his own Almighty hand.
He hath caused him to spring from a trunk without root, and planted him again in a distant and more delightful spot, and caused him to rise up to a considerable tree.
Inspired him with an inclination for science so passionate as to become the most gratifying of all others.
Given him all the means he could either wish for, or enjoy, of attaining the objects he had in view.
Favoured him in such a manner that even the not obtaining of what he wished for, ultimately turned out to his great advantage.
Caused him to be received into favour by the "Mœcenates Scientiarum"; by the greatest men in the kingdom; and by the Royal Family.
Given him an advantageous and honourable post, the very one that, above all others in the world, he had wished for.
Given him the wife for whom he most wished, and who managed his household affairs whilst he was engaged in laborious studies.
Given him children who have turned out good and virtuous.
Given him a son for his successor in office.
Given him the largest collection of plants that ever existed in the world, and his greatest delight.
Given him lands and other property, so that though there has been nothing superfluous, nothing has he wanted.
Honoured him with the titles of Archiater, Knight, Nobleman, and with Distinction in the learned world.
Protected him from fire.
Preserved his life above 60 years.
Permitted him to visit his secret council-chambers.
Permitted him to see more of the creation than any mortal before him. Given him greater knowledge of natural history than any one had hitherto acquired.
The Lord hath been with him whithersoever he hath walked, and hath cut off all his enemies from before him, and hath made him a name, like the name of the great men that are in the earth. 1 Chron. xvn. 8.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

As quoted in The Annual Review and History of Literature http://books.google.com.mx/books?id=hx0ZAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=es#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Lord%20himself%20hath%20led%20him%20with%20his%20own%20Almighty%20hand%22&f=false (1806), by Arthur Aikin, T. N. Longman and O. Rees, p. 472.
Also found in Life of Linnaeus https://archive.org/stream/lifeoflinnaeus00brigiala#page/176/mode/2up/search/endeavoured (1858), by J. Van Voorst & Cecilia Lucy Brightwell, London. pp. 176-177.
Linnaeus Diary