Quotes about summer
A collection of quotes on the topic of spring, winter, season, autumn.
Best quotes about summer

“This summer I have discovered something totally useless.”
Writing to a colleague about his proposal for a particle at the origin of mass (1964), as quoted in The Hunt for the Higgs Boson http://www.sciencescotland.org/feature.php?id=14, Science Scotland, issue no. 3.

“Summer's lease hath all too short a date.”
Source: Sonnets (1609), XVIII
Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets
Context: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date
“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

“Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.”
Now and Forever
Quotes about summer

“No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
No. 9, The Autumnal, line 1
Elegies
Source: The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

“That was a great time, the summer of '71 - I can't remember it, but I'll never forget it!”

Bk. 1, ch. 6; as translated by Henry Graham Dakyns in Cyropaedia (2004) p. 31.
Cyropaedia, 4th Century BC

The Vision: Reflections on the Way of the Soul (1994)

About his second piano concerto. Masterworks of the Orchestral Repertoire: A Guide for Listeners by Donald N. Ferguson.

As quoted in New York Times (25 October 1970)

Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, ch. 10 (1993).

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”

“I know I am but summer to your heart,
and not the full four seasons of the year.”
Source: I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”
Richard, Act I, scene i.
Variant: Now is the winter of our discontent.
Source: Richard III (1592–3)
Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”
Often attributed to Twain, but of unknown origin. http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/scrapbook/04_trouble/ http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=009Ckt http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/08/19/MNGOBEA9JI1.DTL This entry from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/30/coldest-winter/ discusses some possible early sources.
Twain did write, in Roughing It http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177.txt:
The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth--if you have it--in August and January, just the same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other. You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you choose--three or four miles away--it does not blow there.
Misattributed

Solitude (1853), conclusion
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)
Context: p>Ye golden hours of Life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.</p

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

Quote (1908), # 831, in The Diaries of Paul Klee; University of California Press, 1964; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Three' : Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html
1903 - 1910

Kodachrome
Song lyrics, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973)
second side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

The Secret of Guidance (1896)

quote from an interview Claude Monet par lui-meme, by Thiébault-Sisson / translated by Louise McGlone Jacot-Descombes; published in 'Le Temps newspaper', 26 November 1900
about Eugène Boudin, who was landscape-painting in and around Le Havre c. 1856; Monet was 16 years old, then
1900 - 1920

Raymond Linex (June 12, 1998) "Strong arm of the law - Arlington policeman sets sights on Mr. Olympia title", The Dallas Morning News, p. 1B.

Source: Christianity and Power Politics (1936), Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman"
"The Wanderer" from Eden's Island (1960)
Empire of Dreams (prose poetry, 1988)

Source: 1920s, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch. 2: Dreams and Facts

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

“Wanting is—what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
Where is the blot?”
Wanting—is what?
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Epitaph for his daughter, Olivia Susan Clemens (1896), this is actually a slight adaptation of the poem "Annette" by Robert Richardson; more details are available at "The Poem on Susy Clemens' Headstone" http://www.twainquotes.com/headstone.html
Misattributed

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)

“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

" Sonnet. To Science http://library.thinkquest.org/11840/Poe/science.html", l. 12-14 (1829).

Return to Tipasa (1954)
Variant translation: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
As translated in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968), p. 169; also in The Unquiet Vision : Mirrors of Man in Existentialism (1969) by Nathan A. Scott, p. 116

Ch. 18 (Martin Palmer/Elizabeth Breuily, Penguin Publishing 1996)

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 51.

Ode.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

"School's Out" - Lyrics online http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=596.
School's Out (1972)

“O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.”
The Folly Of Being Comforted http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1623/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Context: One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-belovéd's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seems impossible, and so
All that you need is patience.'
Heart cries, 'No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs about her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.'
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.

The monster to Robert Walton
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?
First lines
Vineland (1990)
Context: LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed.

“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.”
Fragment 67
Numbered fragments

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)

As quoted in "Ronald Reagan and Race" https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ronald-reagan-and-race-richard-nixon-tape/ (August 2019), by Jay Nordlinger, National Review
1970s
“In summer moonlight, she was dangerously, inebriatingly magnified.”
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Source: Five Go Off in a Caravan
Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain
Source: On the Jellicoe Road

“… In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers…”