Quotes about summer

A collection of quotes on the topic of spring, winter, season, autumn.

Best quotes about summer

“Sound loves to revel in a summer night.”

Edgar Allan Poe Al Aaraaf

Al Aaraaf (1829).

“This summer I have discovered something totally useless.”

Peter Higgs (1929) British physicist

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.”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

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

“The end-of-summer winds make people restless.”

Sebastian Faulks book Engleby

Source: Engleby

“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

“Summer had come to sit on New York's face.”

Tom Robbins Skinny Legs and All

Source: Skinny Legs and All

“Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“Summer quiet thoughts on summer quiet noons.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Now and Forever

“The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Quotes about summer

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook:Part Two
No Longer Human

Dreams, Failure, Suffering, Chance

“No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

John Donne (1572–1631) English poet

No. 9, The Autumnal, line 1
Elegies
Source: The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose

Beauty, Beauty, Spring, Autumn

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

Lemmy Kilmister (1945–2015) British singer-songwriter

Time, Forgetting

“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) Finnish children's writer and illustrator

Love, Beauty, Way, Autumn

“If the campaign is in summer the general must show himself greedy for his share of the sun and the heat, and in winter for the cold and the frost, and in all labours for toil and fatigue. This will help to make him beloved of his followers.”

Xenophon book Cyropaedia

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

Winter, Sun, Help

“My Soul gave me good counsel, teaching me never to delight in praise or to be distressed by reproach. Before my Soul taught me, I doubted the value of my accomplishments until the passing days sent someone who would extol or disparage them. But now I know that trees blossom in the spring and give their fruits in the summer without any desire for accolades. And they scatter their leaves abroad in the fall and denude themselves in the winter without fear of reproof.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

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

Fear, Soul, Spring, Tree

“One swallow does not make a summer,
neither does one fine day;
similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”

Aristotle book Nicomachean Ethics

Source: The Nicomachean Ethics

Depressing, Time, Personality, Happiness

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) Finnish children's writer and illustrator

Books, Girl, Time

“Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and irony itself-- do these things go out with life? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Life, Fish, Light, Sun

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is content. From a knowledge of those limitations and its richness of experience emerges a symphony of colours, richer than all, its green speaking of life and strength, its orange speaking of golden content and its purple of resignation and death.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

Epilogue, p. 328
My Country and My People (1935)

Life, Death, Wisdom, Age

“Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.
Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.
Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.
Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.”

Yoko Ono (1933) Japanese artist, author, and peace activist

Spring, Autumn, Winter, Perseverance

“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu

Source: Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Life, Spring, Flowers, Thinking

“A soft Sea washed around the House
A Sea of Summer Air
And rose and fell the magic Planks
That sailed without a care —
For Captain was the Butterfly
For Helmsman was the Bee
And an entire universe
For the delighted crew.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Universe, Bee, Housing, Sea

“Although it may seem incredible, this cure helped me. At the beginning of the summer I began to compose… New musical ideas began to stir with me-far more than I needed for my concerto. By the autumn I had finished the Adagio and Finale… The Two movements I played… at a charity concert… They had a gratifying success… By the Spring I had finished the first movement of the concerto… Out of gratitude, I dedicated it to Nikolay Dahl.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) Russian composer, pianist, and conductor

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

Music, Spring, Idea, Autumn

“Dancing in Tijuana when I was 13 — that was my "summer camp." How else do you think I could keep up with Fred Astaire when I was 19?”

Rita Hayworth (1918–1987) American actress, dancer and director

As quoted in New York Times (25 October 1970)

Thinking, Dance

“In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold.”

Yi-Fu Tuan (1930) Chinese-American geographer

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

Life, Art, Mood, Painting

“You're my bondage and my freedom,
my flesh burning like a naked summer night,
you're my country.
Hazel eyes marbled green,
you're awesome, beautiful, and brave,
you're my desire always just out of reach.”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From You're

Beauty, Freedom, Night, Country

“Being a beggar, he said, was not his fault, and he refused either to have any compunction about it or to let it trouble him. He was the enemy of society, and quite ready to take to crime if he saw a good opportunity. He refused on principle to be thrifty. In the summer he saved nothing, spending his surplus earnings on drink, as he did not care about women. If he was penniless when winter came on, then society must look after him. He was ready to extract every penny he could from charity, provided that he was not expected to say thank you for it. He avoided religious charities, however, for he said it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns. He had various other points of honour; for instance, it was his boast that never in his life, even when starving, had he picked up a cigarette end. He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

On "Bozo", in Ch. 30
Down and out in Paris and London (1933)

Life, Women, Drink, Winter

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

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

Winter, Learning, Motivational, For women

“I know I am but summer to your heart,
and not the full four seasons of the year.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII)

Relationship, Heart, Season

“Nights and days came and passed
And summer and winter
and the rain.
And it was good to be a little Island.
A part of the world
and a world of its own
All surrounded by the bright blue sea.”

Margaret Wise Brown book The Little Island

Variant: nights and days came and passed
and summer and winter
and the sun and the wind
and the rain.
and it was good to be a little island
a part of the world
and a world of its own
all surrounded by the bright blue sea.
Source: The Little Island

World, Winter, Parting, Sea

“It was a drowsy summer afternoon, and the Forest was full of gentle sounds, which all seemed to be saying to Pooh, 'Don't listen to Rabbit, listen to me.' So he got in a comfortable position for not listening to Rabbit.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner

“Again and again, the cicada’s untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.”

Yukio Mishima book Runaway Horses

Source: Runaway Horses

Cry, Clothes

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”

William Shakespeare Richard III

Richard, Act I, scene i.
Variant: Now is the winter of our discontent.
Source: Richard III (1592–3)

Winter, Sun

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”

Madeline Miller book The Song of Achilles

Source: The Song of Achilles

Way, Sun, Happiness

“There was nothing like a Saturday - unless it was the Saturday leading up to the last week of school and into summer vacation. That of course was all the Saturdays of your life rolled into one big shiny ball.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Rising Tides

Life, School

“And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs Dalloway

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Flowers, Tree, Light

“Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Tree, Light, Grass, Winter

“I wonder if the snowthe trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

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

Kiss, Sleep, Tree

“I don't know how long I kept at it…
I felt reasonably safe, streched out on the floor, and lay quite still.
It didn't seem to be summer any more”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

“Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Autumn, Bird, Singing, Flying

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

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

Winter

“I'd give all the wealth that years have piled,
the slow result of life's decay,
To be once more a little child
for one bright summer day.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

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

Life, Wealth

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

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

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Feeling, Soul, Flowers

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”

Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass

Source: Through the Looking Glass

Life, Lie, Dreams

“In her eyes is the living Hght
Of a wanderer to earth
From a far celestial height:
Summers five are all the span —
Summers five since Time began
To veil in mists of human night
A shining angel-birth.

Does an angel look from her eyes?
Will she suddenly spring away,
And soar to her home in the skies?
Beatrice! Blessing and blessed to be!”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

Beatrice (1862), st. 1
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Birth, Angels, Home, Spring

“The changeover was complete; in the summer of 1907 I devoted myself entirely to the appearance of nature and upon these studies built my black-and-white landscapes on glass, 1907/1908.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

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

Nature, Study, Appearance

“Kodachrome,
They give us those nice bright colours,
Give us the greens of summers,
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day,
Oh, yeah, I got a Nikon camera,
I love to take a photograph,
So Mama, don't take my Kodachrome away.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Kodachrome
Song lyrics, There Goes Rhymin' Simon (1973)

Love, World, Thinking

“Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

World, Light, Sun, Season

“There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose.”

Herman Melville book Pierre: or, The Ambiguities

First lines, Bk. I, ch. 1
Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)

World, Feeling, Flowers, Nature

“Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles away from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.
And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses created by the military service in Vietnam. So it goes.
My father died many years ago now — of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Home, Nature, Night

“The story starts when it was hot and it was summer and…
I had it all, I had him right there where I wanted him
She came along, got him alone and let's hear the applause
She took him faster than you could say "sabotage"I never saw it coming, wouldn't have suspected it
I underestimated just who I was dealing with
She had to know the pain was beating on me like a drum
She underestimated just who she was stealing from”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

Better Than Revenge.
Song lyrics, Speak Now (2010)

Pain

“I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started... I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see... The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of... Walk them out stretched, it's great.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

second side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Change, Painting, Housing

“Let us, therefore, not live in the summer‑house of emotion, but in the central citadel of the will, wholly yielded and devoted to the will of God.”

Frederick Brotherton Meyer (1847–1929) English Baptist pastor and evangelist

The Secret of Guidance (1896)

God, Housing

“I also did some jail time a few years ago. Spent a whole summer in jail reading books. I pumped a ton of new knowledge and new thinking into myself.”

Tommy Lee (1962) American drummer

http://www.malibumag.com/onlinemagazine/junejuly05/tommylee.htm.

Books, Knowledge, Thinking, Time

“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 3 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

Winter, Heart

“Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Love

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

C.G. Jung book Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Closing lines of the preface.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963)

Life, Appearance, Parting

“I could not appreciate his [ Boudin ] paintings and when he offered to take me with him to paint outdoors in the open countryside, I always found a pretext and refused politely. But when summer came, I was more or less free to dispose of my time as I wished and I had no feasible excuse left to give him and gave in. Thus it was, that Boudin - with his inexhaustible kindness - took it upon himself to educate me. With time, my eyes began to open and I really started to understand nature. I also learned to love it. I would analyze its forms with my pencil. I would study its colorations.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

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

Love, Education, Color, Understanding

“I want to help the up-and-coming kids. A lot of times, kids don't have much to do in the summer time. When I was a kid I didn't do nothing. I want to get body building out there and it will start with the younger generation.”

Ronnie Coleman (1964) American bodybuilder

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

Time, Help

“The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and moralism expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message!”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) American protestant theologian

Source: Christianity and Power Politics (1936), Chapter 29: "Hitler and Buchman"

Age, World, Religion, Hope

“The seasons come and the seasons go, the summer fruit and the winter snow, but here we are, and here we stay — until the time to go away.
Ah, they say, there's a land that is great, and is grand; there's no fear, and no pain — we will all live again — and everyone will find the ones they love.”

Eden ahbez (1908–1995) American songwriter and recording artist

"The Wanderer" from Eden's Island (1960)

Love, Pain, Fear, Winter

“And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country

A Man Without a Country (2005)

Life, Drink, Thinking, Tree

“What does winter or autumn or spring or summer know of memory. They know nothing of memory. They know that seasons pass and return. They know that they are seasons. That they are time. And they know how to affirm themselves. And they know how to impose themselves. And they know how to maintain themselves, What does autumn know of summer. What sorrows do seasons have. None hate. None love. They just pass.”

Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer

Empire of Dreams (prose poetry, 1988)

Love, Hate, Spring, Autumn

“Here's the thing. I always hear that whole 'metal is dead' crap. The truth of the matter is that when we started the Ozzfest, media-wise, yes, metal was dead. But as far as the kids went, it was still huge. It was just that radio and MTV decided it wasn't in vogue with what they wanted to do at the time, so the average person didn't hear too much about it. That's why when it comes to picking the new acts each summer, we have people out there on the internet and in the clubs looking for good music and finding bands that people are excited about. I want to know what the kids are into, because I don't trust the industry.”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Guitar World Issue 37, 2000.

People, Truth, Music, Time

“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

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

“Now you see that the hope and the desire of returning home and to one's former state is like the moth to the light, and that the man who with constant longing awaits with joy each new spring time, each new summer, each new month and new year — deeming that the things he longs for are ever too late in coming — does not perceive that he is longing for his own destruction. But this desire is the very quintessence, the spirit of the elements, which finding itself imprisoned with the soul is ever longing to return from the human body to its giver. And you must know that this same longing is that quintessence, inseparable from nature, and that man is the image of the world.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

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

World, Hope, Home, Soul

“Wanting is—what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
Where is the blot?”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Wanting—is what?
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
Green sod above, lie light, lie light —
Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

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

Lie, Light, Sun, Heart

“There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 18

Time

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)

Reality, Sense, Memory, Change

“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Winter, Country

“Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

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

Dreams, Tree, Grass

“O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

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

Fate, Light, Winter, Cry

“Chuang Tzu's wife died and Hui Tzu came to console him, but Chuang Tzu was sitting, legs akimbo, bashing a battered tub and singing. Hui Tzu said, 'You lived as man and wife, she reared your children. At her death surely the least you should be doing is to be on the verge of weeping, rather than banging the tub and singing: this is not right!' Chuang Tzu said, 'Certainly not. When she first died, I certainly mourned just like everyone else! However, I then thought back to her birth and to the very roots of her being, before she was born. Indeed, not just before she was born but before the time when her body was created. Not just before her body was created but before the origin of life's breath. Her life's breath wrought a transformation and she had a body. Her body wrought a transformation and she was born. Now there is yet another transformation and she is dead. She is like the four seasons in the way that spring, summer, autumn and winter follow each other. She is now at peace, lying in her chamber, but if I were to sob and cry it would certainly appear that I could not comprehend the ways of destiny. This is why I stopped.<nowiki/”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

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

Life, Death, Children, Peace

“Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

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

God, Children, Flowers

“Global warming. Every day I leave my house and think, "was it this hot last year?" the heat this summer here in LA and in most of the US has been unbearable. I can't remember another time when it was 105 degrees fahrenheit out here (40.5 celsius), and that's the kind of weather we've been having pretty much every day.”

Mike Shinoda (1977) American musician

LP/FM MB 2006

Thinking, Time, Housing, Weather

“It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I’d have to go back to school again. “NO WAY, JOSÉ!” I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to “break” us, not “amanzar” us.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

Life, School, Way, Learning

“Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Let thine shadows upon the sundials fall,
and unleash the winds upon the open fields.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book The Book of Images

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.
Herbsttag (Autumn Day) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images) (1902)

Time

“Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early Frost.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

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

Children, Flowers

“Well we can't salute ya
Can't find a flag
If that don't suit ya
That's a drag School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces.”

Alice Cooper (1948) American rock singer, songwriter and musician

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

School

“O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

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.

Way

“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.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

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?

World, Bird

“In Mrs. Swinton's garden, it was always summer. The lovely almond trees stood about it in perpetual leaf. Monica Swinton plucked a saffron-colored rose and showed it to David.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)

“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.”

Thomas Pynchon book Vineland

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.

Dreams, Light, Time

“For well-being and health, again, the homestead should be airy in summer, and sunny in winter. A homestead possessing these qualities would be longer than it is deep; and its main front would face the south.”

Aristotle Economics

1345a.20 http://artflx.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusGreekTexts&getid=1&query=Arist.%20Oec.%201345a.20, Economics (Oeconomica), Greek Texts and Translations, Perseus under PhiloLogic. Economics

Health, Winter

“God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.”

Heraclitus (-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

Fragment 67
Numbered fragments

Hunger, God, War, Peace

“And then, on a hot summer day, they assembled here, in our nation’s capital, under the shadow of the Great Emancipator -- to offer testimony of injustice, to petition their government for redress, and to awaken America’s long-slumbering conscience. We rightly and best remember Dr. King’s soaring oratory that day, how he gave mighty voice to the quiet hopes of millions; how he offered a salvation path for oppressed and oppressors alike. His words belong to the ages, possessing a power and prophecy unmatched in our time.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

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

Age, Hope, Time

“This last summer, when I was on my way back to Vienna from the Appetite-Cure in the mountains, I fell over a cliff in the twilight, and broke some arms and legs and one thing or another, and by good luck was found by some peasants who had lost an ass, and they carried me to the nearest habitation, which was one of those large, low, thatch-roofed farm-houses, with apartments in the garret for the family, and a cunning little porch under the deep gable decorated with boxes of bright colored flowers and cats; on the ground floor a large and light sitting-room, separated from the milch-cattle apartment by a partition; and in the front yard rose stately and fine the wealth and pride of the house, the manure-pile. That sentence is Germanic, and shows that I am acquiring that sort of mastery of the art and spirit of the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”

Mark Twain Christian Science

Book I, Ch. 1 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3187/3187-h/3187-h.htm#link2H_4_0002 Christian Science (1907)

Family, Housing, Light, Mountain

“My first few years as governor were during the period when people talked of long hot summers to come. We had had the Watts riots just prior to my taking office and racial tensions were very high. Without informing the press, I traveled up and down the state meeting with minority groups and leaders, sometimes in private homes, sometimes in headquarters they had in various community projects. I wanted to know firsthand what their problems were, what was on their minds, and what we could do to change things.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

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

Home, People, Communication, Problem

“I have a message for anyone coming to the Ozzfest this summer (Summer, 2000): If you're planning to jump up onstage during my set, please do not give me any bear hugs, because they fucking hurt. Listen to me, I'm dead serious. On the first night of last year's tour, this enormous guy jumped up onstage and gave me a huge bear hug. He crushed 3 of my ribs and I had to do the whole tour in absolute agony. I couldn't believe it, the first fucking show!”

Ozzy Osbourne (1948) English heavy metal vocalist and songwriter

Guitar World Issue 37, 2000.

Hurt, Night, Dead, Guy