Quotes about cloud (979 quotes, page 3)

“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

“And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance—
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins.”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Peace , Tree , Dance

“Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.”

Shunryu Suzuki (1904–1971) Japanese Buddhist missionary

Star , Sun

“If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Effort

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Mountain

“After all this kind of fanfare, and even more, I came to a point where I needed solitude and to just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living,' I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds…”

Jack Kerouac book Lonesome Traveler

Variant: I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
Source: Lonesome Traveler

Lie , Thinking , Solitude , Grass

“Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none.”

John Bunyan The Pilgrim's Progress

Source: The Pilgrim's Progress

Water

“A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.”

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) American children's writer, diarist, and journalist

“She fell asleep, and it was a sleep as thin as the night clouds, dotted with dreams that came and went like the stars.”

Lois Lowry book Number the Stars

Source: Number the Stars

Dreams , Star , Sleep , Night

“You would not cry if you knew that by looking deeply into the rain you would still see the cloud.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: No Death, No Fear

Cry

“Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?”

Alan Lightman (1948) Physicist, science writer, essayist, novelist

Love , Nature , Personality

“Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

Star , Light

“there are policemen in the street
and angels in the clouds”

Charles Bukowski book The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Source: The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Angels

“We all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn't have any.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

“Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

Music , Heart

“Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Tree , Grass

“As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so sex with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: My Religion

Sex , Joy , Selfishness

“Love is such a magic thing. It can make you feel like your floating in the clouds without a trouble in the world.”

Lois Gladys Leppard (1924–2008) American writer

Source: Mandie and the Courtroom Battle

Love , World , Feeling

“We are crayons and lunchboxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Wintergirls

Source: Wintergirls

“Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life,
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!”

George Gordon Byron book The Bride of Abydos

Canto II, stanza 20.
The Bride of Abydos (1813)

Life , Smile

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Beauty

“The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

“How sweet to be a Cloud Floating in the Blue! It makes him very proud To be a little cloud.”

A.A. Milne book Winnie-the-Pooh

Variant: How sweet to be a cloud
Floating in the blue.
Source: Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)

“Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

God , Home , Forgetting

“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”

Richard Brautigan The Tokyo-Montana Express

Page 150
The Tokyo-Montana Express

History

“As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space
an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble
a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning
view all created things like this.”

Red Pine (1943) American author, poet, and translator of poetry

Source: The Diamond Sutra

Dreams , Star

“The visions are fragmented and a dark cloud spreads like spilt ink across the pages of possible futures.”

Garth Nix book Abhorsen

Source: Lirael

Future

“Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

Love , Heart

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Attributed
Source: Les Essais

Books , Help

“I would build a cloudy House
For my thoughts to live in;
When for earth too fancy-loose
And too low for Heaven!
Hush! I talk my dream aloud -
I build it bright to see, -
I build it on the moonlit cloud,
To which I looked with thee.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author

Dreams , Housing

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Life , Soul , Star , Birth

“People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

People , Mountain , Thinking

“What are clouds, but an excuse for the sky? What is life, but an escape from death?”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Yabu-san's death poem after being ordered to commit seppuku.
Shōgun (1975)

Life , Death

“The cloud is free only to go with the wind. The rain is free only in falling.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

“The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Source: The Magnetic Fields

Star , Night

“Floating to shore… riding a low moon… on a slow cloud.”

Nikki Giovanni (1943) American writer and academic

“He is much stronger than I think I am. He is mischievous, outgoing, ready to soar
through the clouds, while I often feel
like the cloud itself.”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

Feeling , Thinking

“I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totallylife. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is…”

Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) American poet, art critic and writer

People , Grass , Sincerity

“I would much prefer their minds to be engaged in the deadly arts than clouded with dreams of marriage and fortune, as your own so clearly is!”

Seth Grahame-Smith book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Source: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Marriage , Dreams , Art

“A little (one) can sometimes see things in others that us older ones cannot because our judgement gets clouded.

—Abbot Saxtus”

Brian Jacques book The Bellmaker

Source: The Bellmaker

“I had only one desire: to leave, to walk, to die, whatever. I wanted to get away, never come back, disappear, melt away into the forest, the clouds, no longer have memories, forget, forget.”

Ágota Kristóf (1935–2011) Hungarian Swiss writer

Source: Yesterday

Memory , Forgetting

“It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are… than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Thinking

“I want to tear myself from this place, from this reality, rise up like a cloud and float away, melt into this humid summer night and dissolve somewhere far, over the hills.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

Source: The Kite Runner

Reality , Tear , Summer , Night

“All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other—
Only the mountain and I.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

[38] "Alone Looking at the Mountain"
Variant translations:
The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
"Zazen on Ching-t'ing Mountain", trans. Sam Hamill
Flocks of birds fly high and vanish;
A single cloud, alone, calmly drifts on.
Never tired of looking at each other—
Only the Ching-t'ing Mountain and me.
"Sitting Alone in Ching-t'ing Mountain", trans. Irving Y. Lo

Mountain , Bird

“My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I got out of bed at all
the morning rain clouds up my window and I can't see at all
And even if I could it'd all be grey, but your picture on my wall
it reminds me that it's not so bad
it's not so bad”

Dido (1971) English singer-songwriter

Thank You
Song lyrics, No Angel (1999)

Tea

“The interface between an industrial economy and the biosphere is what the industrial nation state can’t handle. So the new culture isn't based on nation state turf; it's based on biological, ecological processes, so the atmosphere is more the model than the land. And the science that would describe the processes of the atmosphere are more the new complex dynamical sciences, chaotic systems of clouds, rather than the clods.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Interview with Thompson in Life, Lindisfarne, and Everything, from Alexandria 4: The Order and Beauty of Nature edited by David Fideler (1997).

Science

“When people look for the road in the clouds
The cloud road disappears
The mountains are tall and steep
The streams are wide and still
Green mountains ahead and behind
White clouds to east and west
If you want to find the cloud road
Seek it within”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

People , Mountain

“The President cannot make clouds to rain and cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business good; although when these things occur, political parties do claim some credit for the good things that have happened in this way.”

William Howard Taft (1857–1930) American politician, 27th President of the United States (in office from 1909 to 1913)

Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers (Columbia University Press, 1916)

Way , Business

“I had innumerable visions at that time [c. 1903]; wherever I looked, Nature was alive, the sky, the clouds, on every stone and among the branches of the trees, everywhere my creatures stirred and lived their still or wild, lively lives, arousing my excitement and crying out to be painted.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

1900 - 1920

Nature , Tree , Time , Painting

“Though one were fair as roses
His beauty clouds and closes.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

The Garden of Proserpine.
Undated

Beauty

“A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky:
There eke the soft delights that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast,
And the calm pleasures always hover'd nigh;
But whate'er smack'd of noyance or unrest
Was far, far off expell'd from this delicious nest.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto I, Stanza 6.
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Pleasure , Dreams , Summer

“Fame far out-strips all Mischiefs in her course,
Which grows by Motion, gains, by flying, Force;
Kept under first by Fear, soon after shrouds,
Stalking or Earth, her Head amongst the Clouds.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

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

Fear , Flying

“There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm.”

John Heyl Vincent (1832–1920) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 556.

“This mountain-ash, whose flower-fill'd boughs
Spread like a cloud at noon —
Whose shade is as a haunted place
For the sweet airs of June :
'Twas but a little shrub when first
I wreathed amid thy hair
Its berries, like the coral crown
That the sea-maidens wear.”

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

(20th November 1824) Constancy
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Mountain , Flowers , Sea

“It should be a point for careful consideration, then, that with due consideration for perspective, lighting, etc., those clouds should be chosen for a landscape which, together with the landscape, will make a well-composed, well-balanced, and symmetrical whole.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Composition and clouds considered as an aid to expression, p. 104

Light

“It is a night of summer,—and the sea
Sleeps, like a child, in mute tranquillity.
Soft o'er the deep-blue wave the moonlight breaks;
Gleaming, from out the white clouds of its zone”

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

Rosalie.
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Sleep , Summer , Sea , Night

“How wonderful is Cold Mountain
Climbers are all afraid
The moon shines on clear water twinkle twinkle
Wind rustles the tall grass
Plum trees flower in the snow
Bare twisted trees have clouds for foliage
A touch of rain brings it all alive
Unless you see clearly do not approach”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain , Flowers , Tree , Grass

“One must build to the praise of a Being above, to build the noblest memorial of himself. Then, Angelo may verily " hang the Pantheon in the air." Then the unknown builder, whose personality disappears in his work, may stand an almost inspired mediator between the upward-looking thought and the spheres overhead. Each line then leaps with a swift aspiration, as the vast structure rises, in nave and transept into pointed arch and vanishing spire. The groined roof grows dusky with majestic glooms; while, beneath, the windows flame, as with apocalyptic light of jewels. Angelic presences, sculptured upon the portal, invite the wayfarer, and wave before him their wings of promise. Within is a worship which incense only clouds, which spoken sermons only mar. The building itself becomes a worship, a Gloria in Excelsis, articulate in stone; the noblest tribute offered on earth, by any art, to Him from whom its impulse came, and with the ineffable majesty of whose spirit all skies are filled.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 499.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Art , Angels , Light , Memory

“What most men do not know - and if they could know it, why could they be called on to believe it? - Is that this blue sky, though illusory as an optical error and belied by the vision of interplanetary space, is nonetheless an adequate reflection of the Heaven of the Angels and the Blessed and that therefore, despite everything, it is this blue mirage, flecked with silver clouds, that is right and will have the final say; to be astonished at this amounts to admitting that it is by chance that we are here on earth and see the sky as we do.”

Frithjof Schuon book Understanding Islam

Understanding Islam (1963)

Men , Angels , Error , Chance

“[The] chief [of the gods of Cimmeria] is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods? … There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people. In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Queen of the Black Coast" (1934)

Men , God , People , Pleasure

“My fathering had always taken the form of a friendly cloud that floated across the lives of the children, and paused occasionally to cast a shadow. That they would turn out to have their own weather, and that I would profit by the climate, was an immense satisfaction.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Fathering Instinct" http://books.google.com/books?id=EbQbAQAAMAAJ&q=%22My+fathering+had+always+taken+the+form+of+a+friendly+cloud+that+floated+across+the+lives+of+the+children+and+paused+occasionally+to+cast+a+shadow+That+they+would+turn+out+to+have+their+own+weather+and+that+I+would+profit+by+the+climate+was+an+immense+satisfaction%22&pg=PA112#v=onepage, Ms. magazine, May 1974

Children , Weather

“Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me me.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

B 37 "Speech of a suicide composed shortly before the act."
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Nature

“The breath coming out of your chest
Turns into a dark cloud
And stands like a wall
In front of your eyes”

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales (1928–1990) Iranian poet

Cited in: Newsweek (2009). Vol. 153-154. p. 548

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men , Age , World , Faith

“Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now
I'm tired of the ways of mice and men
And the empires all turning into rust again.
Out of everything nothing remains the same
That's why I'm cloud hidden
Cloud hidden
Whereabouts unknown.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Alan Watts Blues
Song lyrics, Poetic Champions Compose (1987)

Men , Way

“Locked in a struggle for the right combination
Of words in a melody line,
I took a walk along the riverbank of my imagination.
Golden clouds were shuffling the sunshine.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Everything About It Is a Love Song
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Imagination

“When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights.
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;—
When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

The Dong with the Luminous Nose http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/dln.html, st. 1 (1877).

Silence , Night

“I come here to your beautiful country -’ Mr Raj saw through the window bare branches, coil after coil of dirty clouds, washing on neighbour lines, forlorn pecking birds, a distant brace of gasometers. ‘- your beautiful country, I say,’ he said defiantly. ‘…So far I have had mixed career. Fights and insults, complete lack of sexual sustenance - most necessary to men in prime of life - and inability to find accommodation commensurate with social position and academic attainments…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Life , Men , Beauty , Bird

“The usage of the words “public" and “public sphere” betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.”

Jürgen Habermas book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

Source: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1963/1991, p. 1 as cited in: Gandy, M (1997) "Ecology, modernity and the intellectual legacy of the Frankfurt School". In: Light, A and Smith, JM, (eds.) Space, Place and Environmental Ethics. p. 240

Appearance

“Bless your soul, you've got you're head in the clouds,
You made a fool out of you,
And, boy, she's bringing you down,
She made your heart melt,
But you're cold to the core,
Now rumour has it she ain't got your love anymore.”

Adele (singer) (1988) British singer-songwriter

Rumour Has It, written by Adele and Ryan Tedder
Song lyrics, 21 (2011)

Love , Fools , Soul , Boy

“I am the one you saw to-day, who fell
Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell:
A bell that broke great memories in my brain.'
'I am the one who passed unnoticed before you,
Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Pain , Secret , Memory

“What produced this divine serenity, subject to no moods, clouded by no depression, this perpetual Sunday of the heart? It was not merely good nature, not the accident of a happy organization. It was deeper than that. It was the perfect poise resulting from a Christian experience. It was the habit of looking to God in love and to man in love.”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 477.

Love , God , Mood , Nature

“Alec is beautiful,” said Jill, bending down to kiss him.
“Like a mushroom cloud!”

Kage Baker book The Life of the World to Come

scoffed Balkister.
Source: The Life of the World to Come (2004), Chapter 6, “Alec and His Friends” (p. 109)

Beauty , Kiss

“People used to try to hijack quantum mechanics and its inherent mystery to cast a cloud around determinism, in the hope that free will could survive modern physics. But that never worked very well. Since when does random chance equal free will? The only salvation for volition is a soul and faith and you’re not allowed to ask me about that.”

Janna Levin (1967) American theoretical cosmologist

How the Universe Got its Spots (2002)

People , Faith , Hope , Soul

“God is not a limited individual who sits alone up in the clouds on a golden throne. God is pure Consciousness that dwells within everything. Understanding this truth, learn to accept and love everyone equally.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Conversation in Helsinki (2000)

Love , God , Truth , Understanding

“b>Don't let me die in an automobile
I wanna lie in an open field
Want the snakes to suck my skin
Want the worms to be my friends
Want the birds to eat my eyes
As here I lie
The clouds fly by</b”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

"The End; <i>Live in New York</i>" (1970), "The End; Live at The Hollywood Bowl" (1968)

Lie , Bird , Flying

“Through the gloomy clouds break / Blue sky, sunshine, / On the heights and in the valley / Sing the lark and the nightingale
God, I thank you that I live / Not forever in this world / Strengthen me that my soul rise / Upward toward your firmament.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

some poetry lines of Friedrich, c. 1802-05; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich Bekenntnisse, p 57; as quoted & translated by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 48
1794 - 1840

God , World , Soul , Singing

“All my work is informed by personal experience. It is the seed to which I apply a transcendent dialogue. The idea for my first bubble machine was rooted in a complex combination of many memories. During the Second World War I was in my sister’s arms when I saw a young Filipino guerrilla shot by a Japanese soldier. The young guerrilla ran into our garden. The sight of him lying there dying, red blood bubbles foaming from his mouth, made a strong impression on me. Flying over the Grand Canyon on my first trip to America, visiting a soap factory at the bottom of Notre Dame de la Garde in Marseilles, a visit to a brewery in Edinburgh in Scotland: these left deep impressions as well. My mother cooking “guinataan”, a Philippine dessert made of coconut milk and tropical fruit, and the movement of clouds over Manila Bay near where I was born, inspired me to create a work of art that would express and embody the motion of clouds.”

David Medalla (1942) Filipino artist

Source: Adam Nankervis, " A Stitch in time http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=707," in: Mousse Magazine.it, Issue 29, 2015

War , World , Art , Lying

“I went to an audition the other day, they were casting 13 people to be clouds. 14 people showed up, it was overcast.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

People

“Know yourself: a cloud
drifting before your sun.
Cut yourself off from your senses
and behold your sun of intimacy.”

Fakhruddin 'Iraqi (1213–1289) Persian philosopher

Lama’at (Divine Flashes)

Sense , Sun

“Jean, Jean, roses are red
All the leaves have gone green
And the clouds are so low
You can touch them, and so
Come out to the meadow, Jean.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Music to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968)

“These paintings, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

In 1915, w:Otto van Rees, A.C. van Rees, Freundlich, S. Taeuber [his wife] and Arp made an attempt of this sort, as Arp mentioned himself.
Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118

Age , Mountain , Nature , Animals

“What does really happen when the factor of love withdraws from a human relationship? Is it a loss or a gain? Is the real landscape revealed at last, hitherto transfigured, but delusive, too, by the driving mist of fantasy? Is it a perverted vision which finds a glowing cloud more beautiful than the solid truth of a plot of earth? And vice versa, what really happens when the radiance, the glamour, begins to take shape, concentrating on a landscape or on a face?”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

Love , Truth , Beauty , Loss

“You can't be a lover if you want to keep on using
What are you using that's stronger than the love
Sometimes I'm knocked out by the damage that you're doing
Knocked out, locked out, push comes to shove
Listen to the wind tearing at the windows
Watching how the white moon melts into the cloud
Important little tyrants, impotent little pharaohs
Men/man of sorrows lost into the crowd ~ Richochet”

Steve Kilbey (1954) British artist

Lyrics

Love , Men , Lovers , Tear

“I ran home [from Cloud's Rest to Yosemite Valley] in the moonlight, with long, firm strides; for the sun-love made me strong. Down through the junipers — down through the firs; now in jet-shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking rock; past the huge ghost of South Dome, rising weird through the firs — past glorious Nevada — past the groves of Illilouette — through the pines of the valley; frost-crystals flashing all the sky beneath, as star-crystals on all the sky above. All of this mountain-bread for one day!”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 358); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

Love , Home , Mountain , Star

“The two of you start talking about your feelings and your feelings float outside of you like vapors, and they mix together like a fog. Before you realize it, the two of you have become the same mist and you realize you can never return to being just a lone cloud again, because the isolation would be intolerable.”

Douglas Coupland Microserfs

Microserfs (1995)

Feeling

“Even when the shadows of trial are falling around us, let us "pass through the cloud" with the sustaining motive— "All my wish, O God, is to please and glorify Thee!"”

John Ross Macduff (1818–1895) Scottish religious writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 283.

God , Motivation

“Stood there who knows how long looked / at the clouds the hedge / when someone came out of the door it was her daughter.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Daughters

“The sky was horribly dark, but one could distinctly see tattered clouds, and between them fathomless black patches. Suddenly I noticed in one of these patches a star, and began watching it intently. That was because that star had given me an idea: I decided to kill myself that night.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), I

Star , Idea , Night

“The first Christian who can write decent Latin is Minucius Felix, whose Octavius, written in the first half (possibly the first quarter) of the Third Century must have done much to make Christianity respectable. He concentrates on ridiculing pagan myths that no educated man believed anyway and on denying that Christians (he means his kind, of course!) practice incest (a favorite recreation of many sects that had been saved by Christ from the tyranny of human laws) or cut the throats of children to obtain blood for Holy Communion (as some groups undoubtedly did). He argues for a monotheism that is indistinguishable from the Stoic except that the One God is identified as the Christian deity, from whose worship the sinful Jews are apostates, and insists that Christians have nothing to do with the Jews, whom God is going to punish. What is interesting is that Minucius has nothing to say about any specifically Christian doctrine, and that the names of Jesus or Christ do not appear in his work. There is just one allusion: the pagans say that Christianity was founded by a felon (unnamed) who was crucified. That, says Minucius, is absurd: no criminal ever deserved, nor did a man of this world have the power, to be believed to be a god (erratis, qui putatis deum credi aut meruisse noxium aut potuisse terrenum). That ambiguous reference is all that he has to say about it; he turns at once to condemning the Egyptians for worshipping a mortal man, and then he argues that the sign of the cross represents (a) the mast and yard of a ship under sail, and (b) the position of man who is worshipping God properly, i. e. standing with outstretched arms. If Minucius is not merely trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the gullible pagans, it certainly sounds as though this Christian were denying the divinity of Christ, either regarding him, as did many of the early Christians, as man who was inspired but was not to be identified with God, or claiming, as did a number of later sects, that what appeared on earth and was crucified was merely a ghost, an insubstantial apparition sent by Christ, who himself prudently stayed in his heaven above the clouds and laughed at the fools who thought they could kill a phantom. Of course, our holy men are quite sure that he was "orthodox."”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men , God , Children , World

“Particulars are frequently fallible, but universals never. Occult philosophy lays bare Nature in her complete nakedness, and alone contemplates the wisdom of universals by the eyes of intelligence. Accustomed to partake of the rivers which flow from the Fountain of Life, it is unacquainted with grossness and with clouded waters.”

Robert Fludd (1574–1637) British mathematician and astrologer

Robert Fludd, cited in: Arthur Edward Waite (1887). The Real History of the Rosicrucians Founded on Their Own Manifestoes https://archive.org/stream/realhistoryofros00waituoft#page/290/mode/1up. p. 290
Waite commented: "Like others of his school, Fludd insists on the uncertainty of a posteriori and experimental methods, to which he unhesitatingly attributes all the errors of the natural sciences..."

Life , Wisdom , Intelligence , Nature

“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I was fed up with books, which I still continued to gulp down with indiscreet voracity, and searched for a key to the highest truths; there must be a key, and I was certain that, owing to some monstrous conspiracy to my detriment and the world's, I would not get in school. In school they loaded with me with tons of notions that I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: "I will understand this, too, I will understand everything, but not the way they want me to. I will find a shortcut, I will make a lock-pick, I will push open the doors."
It was enervating, nauseating, to listen to lectures on the problem of being and knowing, when everything around us was a mystery pressing to be revealed: the old wood of the benches, the sun's sphere beyond the windowpanes and the roofs, the vain flight of the pappus down in the June air. Would all the philosophers and all the armies of the world be able to construct this little fly? No, nor even understand it: this was a shame and an abomination, another road must be found.”

Primo Levi book The Periodic Table

"Hydrogen"
The Periodic Table (1975)

Life , Truth , Books , World

“I saw two clouds at morning,
Tinged with the rising sun,
And in the dawn they floated on,
And mingled into one.
I thought that morning cloud was blest,
It moved so sweetly to the West.”

John Gardiner Calkins Brainard (1795–1828) American writer

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

Sun

“Fabricius finds certain spots and clouds in the sun.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 3.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part II

Sun

“Only a male intellect clouded by the sexual drive could call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex: for it is with this drive that all its beauty is bound up. More fittingly than the fair sex, women could be called the unaesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor poetry, nor the plastic arts do they possess any real feeling or receptivity: if they affect to do so, it is merely mimicry in service of their effort to please. This comes from the fact that they are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything whatever, and the reason for this is, I think, as follows. Man strives in everything for a direct domination over things, either by comprehending or by subduing them. But woman is everywhere and always relegated to a merely indirect domination, which is achieved by means of man, who is consequently the only thing she has to dominate directly. Thus it lies in the nature of women to regard everything simply as a means of capturing a man, and their interest in anything else is only simulated, is no more than a detour, i. e. amounts to coquetry and mimicry.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "On Women" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Women , Beauty , Art , Music

“You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since, — on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

Charles Dickens book Great Expectations

Source: Great Expectations (1860-1861), Ch. 44

Life , God , Feeling , Boy

“The storm clouds are gathering over the European scene. Our defences have been neglected. Danger is in the air…yes, I say in the air. The mighty discontented nations are reaching out with the strong hands to regain what they have lost; nay, to gain a predominance which they have never had. Is this, then, the time to plunge our vast dependency of India into the melting-pot?”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

BBC broadcast (29 January 1935) against the Indian Home Rule Bill, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 596
The 1930s

Strong , Time , Dependency

“Robert Caserio recently said to me, “The whole profession has become a vast mimicry. The idea that there is open debate is an absolute fiction. There is only the Foucault monologue, the Lacan monologue, the Derrida monologue. There is no room for creative disagreement. No deviation from what is approved is tolerated.” These monologues are really one, the monotonous drone of the School of Saussure, which has cast its delusional inky cloud over modern academic thought. Never have so many been wrong about so much. It is positively idiotic to imagine that there is no experience outside of language. … It has been a truism of basic science courses for decades in America that the brain has multiple areas of function and that language belongs only to specific areas, injured by trauma and restored by surgery or speech therapy.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, p. 214

School , Imagination , Idea , Science

“The choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism and bring together men and women from all walks of life who share a belief in freedom.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in Perth, Scotland (13 May 1983), quoted in New York Times (14 May 1983) "British Vote Campaign Gets Off to Angry Start"
First term as Prime Minister

Life , Women , Men , Way

Quotes about cloud page 3

Quotes about cloud
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