“Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.”
Variant: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Source: Macbeth
“Soun is noght but air ybroken,
And every speche that is spoken,
Loud or privee, foul or fair,
In his substaunce is but air;
For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke,
Right so soun is air ybroke.”
—
Geoffrey Chaucer
,
book
The House of Fame
The House of Fame, bk. 2, l. 257-62
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And every speche that is spoken,
Loud or privee, foul or fair,
In his substaunce is b…" by Geoffrey Chaucer?
Geoffrey Chaucer 99
English poet 1343–1400Related quotes
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“Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.”
Source: The Sound and the Fury
“They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.”
Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi
Context: In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.