Quotes about dawn

A collection of quotes on the topic of dawn, day, night, likeness.

Quotes about dawn

“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter One

Death, Fate, Imagination, Sense

“Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

For Wife, Good Morning, Romantic, Father's Day

“I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land. You who have it to see, welcome it--and forget not those who have fallen during the night!”

José Rizal book Noli Me Tángere

Noli me Tangere
Source: Noli Me Tángere

Night, Forgetting

“Each Time The Wind Blows
I Hear Your Voice So
I Call Your Name.
Whispers At Morning
Our Love Is Dawning
Heaven's Glad You Came.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

I Just Can't Stop Loving You
Bad (1987)

Love, Time

“Sweetheart we're alone
And you are mine.
Let's make this night a night to remember.
Don't make our love a cold dying ember,
For with the dawn, you'll be gone.”

Elvis Presley (1935–1977) American singer and actor

You'll Be Gone, written by Elvis Presley, Red West and Charlie Hodge (1961)
Song lyrics

Love, Night

“I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”

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

Letter announcing Alzheimer's diagnosis http://www.nationalreview.com/document/reagan_sunset200406070915.asp (5 November 1994) Post-presidency (1989&ndash;2004) Context: In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.

Life, God

“Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day. Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous. Do not abuse life. Live in to-day. Be reverent towards each day. Love it, respect it, do not sully it, do not hinder it from coming to flower. Love it even when it is gray and sad like to-day. Do not be anxious. See. It is winter now. Everything is asleep. The good earth will awake again. You have only to be good and patient like the earth. Be reverent. Wait. If you are good, all will go well. If you are not, if you are weak, if you do not succeed, well, you must be happy in that. No doubt it is the best you can do. So, then, why will? Why be angry because of what you cannot do? We all have to do what we can.... Als ich kann.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

Gottfried to Jean-Christophe. Part 3: Ada
Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Youth (1904)

Waiting, Making love, Bad luck, Flowers

“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Variant: A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Source: The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II

World, Way

“Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you — you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Letter to the Secretariat of the Soviet Writers’ Union (12 November 1969) as translated in Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (1970) edited by Leopold Labedz (1970) “Expulsion".

Time

“Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Source: The Religious Affections

Future, Heart

“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

Love, Coffee, Drink, Beer

“Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

Love, Life, Bird, Sea

“He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. — Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. XLI
Adonais (1821)

Death, Dead

“A new era will dawn in Africa, when the impoverished masses of a nation rise up to rescue their right to a decent life from the hands of the ruling oligarchies.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Message to the Tricontinental (1967)

Life

“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer, … But I guess that was exactly what I did.”

Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and sexiest man

biographyonline.net http://www.biographyonline.net/scientists/alex-fleming.html

World

“You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon... Ah, a first ray of sunshine!”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot's description of the beginning of a day in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s

Nature, Tree, Light, Waiting

“O Eternal God, now may it please you
to burn in love
so that we become the limbs
fashioned in the love you felt
when you begot your Son
at the first dawn
before all creation.
And consider this need which falls upon us,
take it from us for the sake of your Son,
and lead us to the joy of your salvation.”

Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Medieval saint, prophetise, mystic and Doctor of Church

"O eterne deus"

Love, God, Fashion, Joy

“Granted that I have the great wisdom to rid myself of the haunting dread of my own death, there remains the death of others and the death of so many feelings and so much sweetness. It is not the conception of truth that will change sorrow. Sorrow, like joy, is absolute.
And yet! The infinite grandeur of our misery becomes confused with glory and almost with happiness, with cold haughty happiness. Was it out of pride or joy that I began to smile when the first white streaks of dawn turned my lamp pale and I saw I was alone in the universe?”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV

Death, Wisdom, Truth, Smile

“I'm so goddamn horny, the crack of dawn better be careful around me!”

Tom Waits (1949) American singer-songwriter and actor

Nighthawks at the Diner (1975).

“The rose is fairest when 't is budding new,
And hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
The rose is sweetest wash'd with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalm'd in tears.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto IV, stanza 1. The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Love, Fear, Hope, Tear

“Nevertheless I long—I pine, all my days—
to travel home and see the dawn of my return.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

V. 219–220 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Travel, Home

“Dawn meet the light,
and the twillight the moon
all are mirages
on labyrinth of mind,
ever since time waking.
Do you think that our existence
makes any difference
to this vast universe?
Did we just happen
or were we meant to happen?
In the universal scheme of things,
we stand nowhere.
We may manage to survive in it,
but we have no control upon it,
except in the little space and time
that we create for ourselves.
We are little possibilities
in the endless probabilities of the universe.”

Alexis Karpouzos book An Ocean of souls

“Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”

Robert Frost Nothing Gold Can Stay

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923)
1920s

Flowers, Nature

“Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 1

Tear, Night

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!”

William Wordsworth book The Prelude

Bk. XI, l. 108.
Source: The Prelude (1799-1805)

“Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,
And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

Star, Sleep, Sun

“sometimes i get up at dawn, and even my soul is wet.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Soul

“I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

Source: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

Life, Nostalgia

“Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Stop for a moment and let that sink in. We’re so used to evaluating everything (and everyone) by their usefulness that this thought will take a minute or two to begin to dawn on us. Nature is not primarily functional. It is primarily beautiful. Which is to say, beauty is in and of itself a great and glorious good, something we need in large and daily doses.”

Stasi Eldredge

Source: Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul

Beauty, Nature

“For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn…”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

People

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day.”

Romain Rolland book Juan Criistobal

Gottfried to Jean-Christophe. Part 3: Ada
Jean-Christophe (1904 - 1912), Youth (1904)
Source: Jean Christophe Vol I
Context: Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day. Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous. Do not abuse life. Live in to-day. Be reverent towards each day.
Context: Be reverent before the dawning day. Do not think of what will be in a year, or in ten years. Think of to-day. Leave your theories. All theories, you see, even those of virtue, are bad, foolish, mischievous. Do not abuse life. Live in to-day. Be reverent towards each day. Love it, respect it, do not sully it, do not hinder it from coming to flower. Love it even when it is gray and sad like to-day. Do not be anxious. See. It is winter now. Everything is asleep. The good earth will awake again. You have only to be good and patient like the earth. Be reverent. Wait. If you are good, all will go well. If you are not, if you are weak, if you do not succeed, well, you must be happy in that. No doubt it is the best you can do. So, then, why will? Why be angry because of what you cannot do? We all have to do what we can.... Als ich kann.

Thinking

“I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Way, Thinking, Suffering, Time

“The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that’s all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that’s all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Truth, Hope, Tear

“We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves.”

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) Mexican artist, surrealist painter and novelist

Light, Silence, Time

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures.”

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

“Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

World

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Death, Light

“Dawn: When men of reason go to bed.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Men

“I rested my hand on Will's shoulder. 'Don't worry. We'll be back by dawn.'
His mouth trembled ever so slightly. 'How can you be sure?'
'I'm the sun god,' I said, trying to muster more confidence than I felt. 'I always return at dawn.”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

God, Confidence, Sun

“I had an epiphany a few years ago when I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends.”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Harlot's House http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/the_harlots_house.html, st. 12 (1885)

Girl

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Bird, Sleep, Sea, Night

“Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

T 2771, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 26
after 1930

God, Christmas

“Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

Sara Teasdale There Will Come Soft Rains

"There Will Come Soft Rains"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Spring, Bird, Tree

“Our best and brightest should be encouraged to find new methods of expression; direct action in protest must not stifled. The dawning of the digital age should be seen as an opportunity to expand our knowledge, and to collectively enhance our communication. Government should have the greatest interest in promoting speech – especially unpopular speech. The government should never be used to suppress new and creative – not to mention, effective – methods of speech and expression”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

From an op-Ed in the Guardian newspaper by Jay Leiderman 22 January 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/22/paypal-wikileaks-protesters-ddos-free-speech
Variant: Our best and brightest should be encouraged to find new methods of expression; direct action in protest must not stifled. The dawning of the digital age should be seen as an opportunity to expand our knowledge, and to collectively enhance our communication. Government should have the greatest interest in promoting speech – especially unpopular speech. The government should never be used to suppress new and creative – not to mention, effective – methods of speech and expression

Age, Communication, Knowledge

“It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere — one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990)

People

“What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen’s arms?”

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Lullaby http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1527/, st. 1 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

World, Sleep

“The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still obtained, and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent and condition. The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of National welfare and National efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the reëlection or defeat of a Congressman here and there—a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Source: 1910s, Theodore Roosevelt — An Autobiography (1913), Ch. XI : The Natural Resources of the Nation, p. 386

Idea, Nature, Knowledge, Problem

“I said to Dawn: Be sudden—to Eve: Be soon.”

Francis Thompson The Hound of Heaven

St. 2.
The Hound of Heaven (1893)

“I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait 'till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Reply upon being asked how he made his discoveries, as quoted in " Biographia Britannica: Or the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons who Have Flourished in Great Britain from the Earliest Ages Down to the Present Times, Volume 5 http://books.google.es/books?id=rYhDAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3241&dq=I+keep+the+subject+constantly+before+me+and+wait+till+the+first+dawnings+open+little+by+little+into+the+full+light.&hl=es&sa=X&ei=ZBsMUpiLDpPU8wTEkYGAAQ&ved=0CEMQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=I%20keep%20the%20subject%20constantly%20before%20me%20and%20wait%20till%20the%20first%20dawnings%20open%20little%20by%20little%20into%20the%20full%20light.&f=false", by W. Innys, (1760), p. 3241.

Light, Waiting

“These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly,
Waking in the dawn of the morning,
In the evening will be a pitiful frivolity,
Sleeping in the cold night’s arms.”

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) Spanish dramatist

Éstas que fueron pompa y alegría despertando al albor de la mañana, a la tarde serán lástima vana durmiendo en brazos de la noche fría. A las flores ("Éstas, que fueron pompa y alegría") http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/A_las_flores_%28Calder%C3%B3n_de_la_Barca%29.

Flowers, Sleep, Night

“I would sooner walk in the dark, and hold hard to a promise of my God, than trust in the light of the brightest day that ever dawned.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 601.

God, Light

“These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.”

Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914) American writer

Triad.
Verses (1915)

Dead

“Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

O guiding night! O night more lovely than the dawn!
O night that has united the Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover.
Variant translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (1991)
Oh night thou was my guide
Oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover to the beloved one
transforming each of them into the other.
Variant adapted for music by Loreena McKennitt (1994)
Dark Night of the Soul

Love, Lovers, Night

“Let all partake of the feast of faith. Let all receive the riches of goodness. Let no one lament their poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed. Let no one mourn their transgressions, for pardon has dawned from the grave. Let no one fear death, for the Saviour's death has set us free.”

John Chrysostom (349–407) important Early Church Father

Paschal Homily

Death, Fear, Faith, Universe

“This is the dawn I waited for
The new day clean and whole
When we emerge from night and silence
To freely inhabit the substance of time”

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1919–2004) Portuguese poet and writer

Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava
O dia inicial inteiro e limpo
Onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio
E livres habitamos a substância do tempo
"25 de Abril" ("25th April 1974"), in Log Book: Selected Poems, trans. ‎Richard Zenith (Carcanet, 1997), p. 78
O Nome das Coisas (1977)

Silence, Time, Waiting, Night

“Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading. He did not permit it and would fly in a rage when he caught me in the act. He hid the candles when he found that I was reading in secret. He did not want me to spoil my eyes. But I obtained tallow, made the wicking and cast the sticks into tin forms, and every night I would bush the keyhole and the cracks and read, often till dawn.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

Secret, Books, Rage, Passion

“It is a little dark still, but there are warnings of the day and somewhere out of the darkness a bird is singing to the Dawn.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) American author

Representative American Negroes, an essay from The Negro Problem, a collection of essays written in 1903 by leading African Americans.

Bird, Singing

“To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Diary-note of Boudin, 3 December, 1856; as cited in the description of his painting 'Sky, Setting Sun, Bushes in Foreground' http://www.muma-lehavre.fr/en/collections/artworks-in-context/eugene-boudin/boudin-skies, by the Muma-museum, Le Havre A quote from Boudin's personal diary sheds remarkable light on a small group of his sky studies 1850s - 1870s

Feeling, Past, Joy

“African independence was greeted with pomp, ceremony, and a resurgence of traditional African music and dance. “A new day has dawned,” “we are on the threshold of a new era,” “we have now entered into the political kingdom”—those were the phrases of the day, and they were repeated until they became clichés.”

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 446.

Music, Dance

“Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: "Does teaching consist in putting questions?" Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Oeconomicus (The Economist) XIX.15 (as translated by H. G. Dakyns)
Xenophon

Secret, Question, Knowledge

“The great duel, the mother of all battles has begun.… The dawn of victory nears as this great showdown begins!”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Broadcast on Baghdad state radio, January 17, 1991.
Comment on the beginning of Desert Storm, quoted in Washington Post (17 January 1991) "Iraqi Leader Remains Defiant Following US-Led Air Attacks" by Nora Boustany

Victory

“Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa - rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

Falsely attributed to Darwin, but actually from The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) by Thomas Dixon, page 134 http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/c/11773-the-clansman-by-thomas-dixon?start=133. Misattributed

Lie, World, Dreams, History

“Night's darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

213
Stray Birds (1916)

Night

“The first impulse came from the consideration of negatives in geometry; I was accustomed to viewing the distances AB and BA as opposite magnitudes. Arising from this idea was the conclusion that if A, B, and C are points of a straight line, then in all cases AB + BC = AC, this being true whether AB and BC are directed in the same direction or in opposite directions (where C lies between A and B). In the latter case AB and BC were not viewed as merely lengths, but simultaneously their considered since they were oppositely directed, Thus dawned the distinction between the sum of lengths and the sum of distances which were fixed in direction. From this resulted the requirement for establishing this latter concept of sum, not simply for the case where the distances were directed in the same or opposite directions, but also for any other case. This could be done in the most simple manner, since the law that AB + BC = AC remains valid when A, B, and C do not lie on a straight line.
This then was the first step which led to a new branch of mathematics… I did not however realize how fruitful and how rich was the field that I had opened up; rather that result seemed scarcely worthy of note until it was combined with a related idea.”

Hermann Grassmann (1809–1877) German polymath, linguist and mathematician

Ausdehnungslehre (1844)

Lie, Law, Mathematics, Idea

“We'd be making sail in the dawn, with a fair breeze, singing a chanty song wid no care to it. And astern the land would be sinking low and dying out, but we'd give it no heed but a laugh, and never look behind. For the day that was, was enough, for we was free men — and I'm thinking 'tis only slaves do be giving heed to the day that's gone or the day to come — until they're old like me.”

Eugene O'Neill The Hairy Ape

Paddy: Scene 1
The Hairy Ape (1922)

Men, Thinking, Singing

“Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.”

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

Tears and Saints (1937)

People

“One sees their shadows stirring on the shining sad expanse of the plain, and reflected in the pallid stagnant surface of the old trenches, which now only the infinite void of space inhabits and purifies, in the center of a polar desert whose horizons fume.
But their eyes are opened. They are beginning to make out the boundless simplicity of things. And Truth not only invests them with a dawn of hope, but raises on it a renewal of strength and courage.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Truth, Sadness, Hope, Courage

“Well I looked at my watch, it was 9:54
I said, "Dance ballerina girl, go go go!"
And we rolled, reelin' and a rockin'
We was reelin' and a rockin'
Rollin' till the break of dawn”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Reelin' and Rockin"' (1958)
Song lyrics

Girl, Dance

“Death is not yet dead everywhere. Some points and surfaces still resist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and once the wind swept away a muffled bugle-call. There are some who still burn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periods they have crossed. But the cold is working into them. The immobility of lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself as it goes by.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition

Death, Cry, Dead

“O bitter is it to abide
In weariness alway:
At dawn to sigh for eventide,
At eventide for day.
Thy noon hath fled: thy sun hath shone:
The brightness of thy day is gone:
What need to lag and linger on
Till life be cold and gray?”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

The Valley of the Shadow of Death (1868)
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Life, Sun

“Rosy-fingered Dawn.”

Homér Iliad

I. 477 (tr. Samuel Butler).
Iliad (c. 750 BC)

“It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event …
And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity, nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing can impoverish.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Death (1912)
Context: It is childish to talk of happiness and unhappiness where infinity is in question. The idea which we entertain of happiness and unhappiness is something so special, so human, so fragile that it does not exceed our stature and falls to dust as soon as we go beyond its little sphere. It proceeds entirely from a few accidents of our nerves, which are made to appreciate very slight happenings, but which could as easily have felt everything the reverse way and taken pleasure in that which is now pain. We believe that we see nothing hanging over us but catastrophes, deaths, torments and disasters; we shiver at the mere thought of the great interplanetary spaces, with their cold and formidable and gloomy solitudes; and we imagine that the revolving worlds are as unhappy as ourselves because they freeze, or clash together, or are consumed in unutterable flames. We infer from this that the genius of the universe is an outrageous tyrant, seized with a monstrous madness, and that it delights only in the torture of itself and all that it contains. To millions of stars, each many thousand times larger than our sun, to nebulee whose nature and dimensions no figure, no word in our languages is able to express, we attribute our momentary sensibility, the little ephemeral and chance working of our nerves; and we are convinced that life there must be impossible or appalling, because we should feel too hot or too cold. It were much wiser to say to ourselves that it would need but a trifle, a few papilla more or less to our skin, the slightest modification of our eyes and ears, to turn the temperature, the silence and the darkness of space into a delicious spring-time, an unequalled music, a divine light. It were much more reasonable to persuade ourselves that the catastrophes which we think that we behold are life itself, the joy and one or other of those immense festivals of mind and matter in which death, thrusting aside at last our two enemies, time and space, will soon permit us to take part. Each world dissolving, extinguished, crumbling, burnt or colliding with another world and pulverized means the commencement of a magnificent experiment, the dawn of a marvelous hope and perhaps an unexpected happiness drawn direct from the inexhaustible unknown. What though they freeze or flame, collect or disperse, pursue or flee one another: mind and matter, no longer united by the same pitiful hazard that joined them in us, must rejoice at all that happens; for all is but birth and re-birth, a departure into an unknown filled with wonderful promises and maybe an anticipation of some unutterable event …
And, should they stand still one day, become fixed and remain motionless, it will not be that they have encountered calamity, nullity or death; but they will have entered into a thing so fair, so great, so happy and bathed in such certainties that they will for ever prefer it to all the prodigious chances of an infinity which nothing can impoverish.

Life, Death, World, Hope

“My Beloved is the mountains,
The solitary wooded valleys,
The strange islands,
The roaring torrents,
The whisper of the amorous gales;
The tranquil night
At the approaches of the dawn,
The silent music,
The murmuring solitude,
The supper which revives, and enkindles love. ~ 14 & 15”

John of the Cross (1542–1591) Spanish mystic and Roman Catholic saint

Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom

Love, Music, Mountain, Solitude

“I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw —
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.”

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

The Dawn http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1612/ The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) Context: I would be ignorant as the dawn That merely stood, rocking the glittering coach Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses; I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw — Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

Knowledge

“Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

My Day (1935–1962)
Context: Little by little it dawned upon me that this law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people. It seemed to me best to go back to the old situation in which, if a man or woman drank to excess, they were injuring themselves and their immediate family and friends and the act was a violation against their own sense of morality and no violation against the law of the land. (14 July 1939)

People, Law, Drink

“It's just that it's dawned on me that 'zero tolerance' only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet
Context: Oh dear, I'm feeling political today. It's just that it's dawned on me that 'zero tolerance' only seems to mean putting extra police in poor, run-down areas, and not in the Stock Exchange.

“Those in the dawn of life require nurturing from others; their personality traits and behaviors are formed during this period and they learn more from example and observation than words; reveal, kindness, truth, respect, and empathy for others.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1978

Life, Personality, Learning, Truth

“We want, in a word, to fulfil nature’s wishes, to further the destinies of humanity, to keep the promises of philosophy, to absolve providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny. So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe; and that in sealing our work with our blood, we may at least glimpse the shining dawn of universal felicity. That is our ambition, that is our goal.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

"On the Principles of Political Morality that Should Guide the National Convention in the Domestic Administration of the Republic" (5 February 1794)

Universe, Nature, People, Country

“The darkness. Goddamn the darkness. It seemed to Garraty they had been buried alive in it. Immured in it. Dawn was a century away. Many of them would never see the dawn. Or the sun. They were buried six feet deep in the darkness. All they needed was the monotonous chanting of the priest, his voice muffled but not entirely obscured by the new-packed darkness, above which the mourners stood. The mourners were not even aware that they were here, they were alive, they were screaming and scratching and clawing at the coffin-lid darkness, the air was flaking and rusting away, the air was turning into poison gas, hope fading until hope itself was darkness, and above all of it the nodding chapel-bell voice of the priest and the impatient, shuffling feet of mourners anxious to be off into the warm May sunshine. Then, overmastering that, the sighing, shuffling chorus of the bugs and the beetles, squirming their way through the earth, come for the feast…I could go crazy, Garraty thought. I could go right the fuck off my rocker.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

Way, Sun, Hope

“They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon.”

Bobby Sands (1954–1981) Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

Diary entry, (17 March 1981), translated from the original Irish, in Skylark Sing your Lonely Song : An Anthology of the Writings of Bobby Sands (1991)
Other writings

People, Heart, Freedom

“When you linger in tormented darkness, remember, the dawning always arrives on time.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1981

Time

“Every search begins with beginner's luck. And every search ends with the victor's being severely tested." The boy remembered an old proverb from his country. It said that the darkest hour of the night came just before the dawn.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

Search, Boy, Night, Country

“She stood slim and proud as some medieval witch princess against dawn.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: The Passion

Princess

“For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”

Alan Paton book Cry, the Beloved Country

Source: Cry, the Beloved Country

“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours (24 April 1816)
1810s

People, Evil

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Heartbreaking, Love, Heart, Parting

“And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Road

Source: The Road

Death, Dreams, Color

“February dawn -- frost
on the path
Where I paced all winter.”

Jack Kerouac Book of Haikus

Source: Book of Haikus

Winter

“Pick-a-lock, Pick-a-lock, you'll regret the day,
When you took a mouse thief and locked him away,
Silly cat, look at that, it's two for one,
A thief and a warrior, by dawn will be gone.”

Brian Jacques book Mossflower

Source: Mossflower

Cats

“And it seemed to me that there were fires
Flying till dawn without number
And I never found out things-those
Strange eyes of his-what colour?

Everything trembling and singing and
Were you my enemy or my friend,
Winter was it or summer?”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Winter, Singing, Summer, Flying

“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Thinking, Time

“I'll tell you this —
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.”

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

"The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)" on the albums L. A. Woman (1971) and An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: No heavenly power will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

Forgiveness