Quotes about summer
page 3

Arthur Rimbaud photo

“I have embraced the summer dawn.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

J'ai embrassé l'aube d'été.
Illuminations. Aube http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Dawn.html (Dawn) (1874)
Variant translation: I have kissed the summer dawn.

James Russell Lowell photo

“There is no price set on the lavish summer,
And June may be had by the poorest comer.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 3
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

William Morris photo
W. H. Auden photo

“The Latmian hunter rests in the summer shade, fit lover for a goddess, and soon the Moon comes with veiled horns.”
Latmius aestiva residet venator in umbra dignus amore deae, velatis cornibus et iam Luna venit.

Source: Argonautica, Book VIII, Lines 28–30

Ossip Zadkine photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William L. Shirer photo
Nicole Oresme photo
André Breton photo
Robert Greene (dramatist) photo
James Thomson (poet) photo
George Herbert photo

“Like summer friends,
Flies of estate and sunneshine.”

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

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

Elizabeth Bibesco photo

“Winter draws what summer paints.”

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897–1945) writer, actress; Romanian princess

Haven (1951)

Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo
Ray Bradbury photo

“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.”

Source: Dandelion Wine (1957), p. 235

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William Allingham photo

“Scarcely a tear to shed;
Hardly a word to say;
The end of a Summer's day;
Sweet Love is dead.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

An Evening; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.”

Act I, scene ii. Compare: "To public feasts, where meet a public rout,— Where they that are without would fain go in, And they that are within would fain go out", John Davies, Contention betwixt a Wife, etc.
The White Devil (1612)

Anton Chekhov photo
Evelyn Waugh photo
Andrew Sullivan photo
Tracey Ullman photo
Peter Sloterdijk photo
Ani DiFranco photo
Robert Southey photo

“It was a summer evening,
Old Kaspar's work was done,
And he before his cottage door
Was sitting in the sun,
And by him sported on the green
His little grandchild Wilhelmine.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 1.
The Battle of Blenheim http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/the_battle_of_blenheim.html (1798)

John Ogilby photo

“Pray for wet Summers, Winters wanting Rain.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Georgicks

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
James Inhofe photo
Henry Adams photo

“…but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand and depart.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Griff Rhys Jones photo

“For me real peace is lying on a river bank in summer with a sprig of grass in my mouth. I have friends who jet off to a luxury hotel. I think, 'How can you enjoy such ghastly luxury?”

Griff Rhys Jones (1953) British actor and comedian

Michael Odell, "This much I know: Griff Rhys Jones", The Guardian, November 5 2006.
Talking about holidays

Dion Boucicault photo
Li Yu (Southern Tang) photo
Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Ben Gibbard photo
John Constable photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Richard Rumelt photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Franz Marc photo

“The harvest of your Summer [1910] is displayed on our walls. I like some of them terrifically. The 'certainty' with which most of it is done makes me feel ashamed of myself. The thousand steps that I need to take for a picture are of no advantage, as I sometimes foolishly used to think. Things must change.”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

In a letter to August Macke, Nov. 1910; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 128
Franz Marc is reacting on Macke who focused in his exhibited works strongly on the independent power of color
1905 - 1910

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
George William Russell photo
Michael Lewis photo

“It is highly doubtful if the Mughal period deserves the credit it has been given as a period of religious tolerance. Akbar is now known only for his policy of sulh-i-kul, at least among the learned Hindus. It is no more remembered that to start with he was also a pious Muslim who had viewed as jihãd his sack of Chittor. Nor is it understood by the learned Hindus that his policy of sulh-i-kul was motivated mainly by his bid to free himself from the stranglehold of the orthodox ‘Ulamã, and that any benefit which Hindus derived from it was no more than a by-product. Akbar never failed to demand daughters of the Rajput kings for his harem. Moreover, as our citations show, he was not able to control the religious zeal of his functionaries at the lower levels so far as Hindu temples were concerned. Jahãngîr, like many other Muslim kings, was essentially a pleasure-seeking person. He, however, became a pious Muslim when it came to Hindu temples of which he destroyed quite a few. Shãh Jahãn did not hide what he wanted to do to the Hindus and their places of worship. His Islamic record on this score was much better than that of Jahãngîr. The reversal of Akbar’s policy thus started by his two immediate successors reached its apotheosis in the reign of Aurangzeb, the paragon of Islamic piety in the minds of India’s Muslims. What is more significant, Akbar has never been forgiven by those who have regarded themselves as custodians of Islam, right upto our own times; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad is a typical example. In any case one swallow has never made a summer.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Henry Moore photo

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

“…as Sir Boyle Roche would say, like the last rose of summer…”

Boyle Roche (1736–1807) Irish politician

[Disraeli, Benjamin, The Young Duke, 1831]
About

Neil Young photo

“Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'.
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin'.
Four dead in Ohio.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Ohio, from 4 Way Street (1971)
Song lyrics, With Crosby, Stills & Nash

Adam Zagajewski photo
Roger Bacon photo

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

John Ruysbroeck photo
Edmund Blunden photo

“Cricket to us, like you, was more than play,
It was a worship in the summer sun.”

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) English poet, author and literary critic

Poem Pride of the Village (1925)

Eino Leino photo

“Outbursts blossom in Lapland rapidly
. in earth, in barley, grass, dwarf birches too.
This I have pondered very frequently
when people’s daily lives there I review.

Oh why are all our beautiful ones dying
and why do great ones rot in disarray?
Oh why among us many minds are losing?
Oh why so few the kantele now play?

Oh why here everywhere a man soon crashes
like hay when scythed – ambitious man indeed,
a man of honour, sense – it all soon smashes,
or breaks apart one day in life of need?

Elsewhere, a fire still glints in greying tresses,
in old ones glows still spirit of the sun.
But here our new-born infants death possesses
and youth will grave’s dull earth soon press upon.

And what of me? Why ponder I so sadly?
An early sign, be sure, of grim old age.
Oh why the blood-spent rule keep I not gladly,
but sigh instead at people’s mortal wage?

One answer is there only: Lapland’s summer.
In thinking then my mind is soon distressed.
In Lapland birdsong, joy are short – a glimmer –
as flowers’ blooms and gladness wilt and rest.

But winter’s wrath is only long. Dear moment
when resting thoughts delay and don’t take flight,
in search of lands where blazing sun is potent
and take their leave of Lapland’s icy bite.

Oh, great white birds, you guests of summer Lapland,
with noble thoughts we’ll greet you, when you’re here!
Oh, tarry here among us, build your nests and
a while delay your southern journey near!

Oh, from the swan now learn a lesson wholesome!
They leave in autumn, come back in the spring.
It’s our own peaceful shore that us-wards pulls them,
Our sloping fell’s kind shelter will them bring.

Batter the air with whooping wings and leave us!
Wonders perform, enlighten other lands!
But when you see that winter’s gone relieve us –
I beg, beseech, re-clasp our weary hands!”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist
Ernest Flagg photo
Sei Shonagon photo
Marcus Aurelius photo

“All that happens is as usual and familiar as the rose in spring and the crop in summer.”

IV, 44
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Joanna Baillie photo

“But woman's grief is like a summer storm,
Short as it violent is.”

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) Scottish poet and dramatist

Act V, scene 3.
Count Basil (1798)

Bashō Matsuo photo

“The summer grasses—
For many brave warriors
The aftermath of dreams.”

夏草や
兵どもが
夢の跡
natsukusa ya
tsuwamonodomo ga
yume no ato
Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, New York, 1999, p. 316 (Translation: Donald Keene)
The summer grasses—
Of brave soldiers' dreams
The aftermath.
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to Oku, Tokyo, 1996, p. 87 (Translation: Donald Keene)
Also: Classical Japanese Database, Translation #222 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/222
Oku no Hosomichi

Sri Aurobindo photo
Ibn Battuta photo
Philip Roth photo

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

“So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

December Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Mary Mapes Dodge photo
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
John Milton photo
Eric Holder photo

“…magisteeerial…the corner kick sails in…and Ramos leaps…like a fresh salmon from a summer stream…it's an exquisite header…with power and accuracy measured down to a pixel!”

Ray Hudson (1955) English footballer

[Mandis, Steven G., The Real Madrid Way: How Values Created the Most Successful Sports Team on the Planet, 2016, BenBella Books, https://books.google.fi/books/about/The_Real_Madrid_Way.html?id=IEbQDAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y, 978-1-942952-54-1]
After Sergio Ramos' 93rd-minute header, which cancelled out Diego Godín's first-half goal.
2014 UEFA Champions League Final

Stevie Wonder photo

“When the summer came you were not around,
Now the summer's gone and love cannot be found,
Where were you when I needed you last winter, my love?”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Superwoman (Where Were You When I Needed You)
Song lyrics, Music of My Mind (1972)

William Ernest Henley photo

“From the winter’s gray despair,
From the summer’s golden languor,
Death, the lover of Life,
Frees us for ever.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

Source: In Hospital (1908), p. 20

Lisa Wilcox photo

“Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Ray Bradbury photo
William Sharp (writer) photo
Guillaume Apollinaire photo

“And now comes the summer of violence
And my youth is as dead as the springtime
O Sun it is the time of fiery Reason”

Voici que vient l'été la saison violente
Et ma jeunesse est morte ainsi que le printemps
Ô soleil c'est le temps de la raison ardente
"La jolie rousse" (The Pretty Redhead), line 31; p. 135.
Calligrammes (1918)

Mark Satin photo
Andreas Schelfhout photo

“.. and since we are now living in the Summer-time, I don't have a trick to imagine me Winter so strongly that I would be able to paint one [a winter-landscape].... and you must have patience until next winter.”

Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch, citaat van Schelfhout, uit zijn brief:) ..en daar wij nu in het Zomer leeven zijn heb ik geen truk [truc] van mij de Winter zoo danig voor den geest te halen dat ik in staat zoude zijn er een te kunnen schilderen.. ..en gij zou den gedult moeten nemen tot aanstaande winter.
Quote of Schelfhout in a letter to his client nl:Johannes Immerzeel, June 1832; as cited in 'Andreas Schelfhout Onsterfelijk schoon', Simonis & Buunk 2005 https://www.simonis-buunk.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/catalogus_schelfhout.pdf, p. 17

Charles Baudelaire photo

“Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!”

Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!
"Chant d'Automne" [Song of Autumn] http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Chant_d%E2%80%99automne
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Gabriele Münter photo
Anton Chekhov photo

“If you wish women to love you, be original; I know a man who used to wear felt boots summer and winter, and women fell in love with him.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Joe Lieberman photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Paul Simon photo
Salvador Dalí photo

“From the moment I arrived in Cadaqués [Summer of 1929] I was assailed by a resurgence of my childhood period. The six years of secondary school, the three years in Madrid and the trip I had just made to Paris, all totally faded into the background, while all the fantasies and representations of my childhood period came back to take victorious possession of my mind.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from Secret Life; as quoted in La vida secreta de Salvador Dalí, S. Dali. In: Complete Works, Autobiographical Articles 1. Ediciones Destino / Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Barcelona / Figueres, 2003, p. 597
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1941 - 1950

Mark Kac photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Love, thou hast hopes like summers, short and bright,
Moments of ecstasy, and maddening dreams,
Intense delicious throbs!”

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

The Basque girl and Henri Quatre from The London Literary Gazette (12th October 1822)
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Frederick Locker-Lampson photo

“And this was your Cradle? Why, surely, my Jenny,
Such cozy dimensions go clearly to show
You were an exceedingly small pickaninny,
Some nineteen or twenty short summers ago.”

Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821–1895) British poet

The old Cradle; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

James Salter photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo