Quotes about dawn
page 2

Shannon Hale photo
Douglas Coupland photo
George Carlin photo
Paulo Coelho photo

“It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn.”

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 132.

Anne McCaffrey photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Nicholas Sparks photo
Hubert H. Humphrey photo

“The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Remarks at the dedication of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, November 1, 1977, Congressional Record, November 4, 1977, vol 123, p. 37287.

Bashō Matsuo photo

“How I long to see
among dawn flowers,
the face of God.”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Source: Haiku

Kate Chopin photo
Kóbó Abe photo

“Little princess, lovely as the dawn, well named Aurore.”

Cameron Dokey (1956) American writer

Source: Beauty Sleep: A Retelling of Sleeping Beauty

Pablo Neruda photo
E.E. Cummings photo

“what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of it's grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: 1 x 1 (1944), XX
Source: 100 Selected Poems

Jean Paul Sartre photo
Victor Hugo photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Libba Bray photo
Patricia A. McKillip photo
Muhammad Iqbál photo
Robin Hobb photo
Daniel Wallace photo
Jean Genet photo
John Steinbeck photo
Philippa Gregory photo
Arthur Rimbaud photo

“But, true, I’ve wept too much! Dawns break hearts./ Every moon is brutal, every sun bitter.”

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

Variant: But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.

Madeline Miller photo
Allen Ginsberg photo
Ezra Pound photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Zora Neale Hurston photo
Ted Hughes photo

“Show him every dawn & read to him endlessly.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Source: Letters of Ted Hughes

James Patterson photo
Fannie Flagg photo

“It's always the darkest just before the glorious dawn.”

Fannie Flagg (1944) American actress, comedian and author

Source: I Still Dream About You

John Ruskin photo

“Let every dawn of morning be to you as the beginning of life, and every setting sun be to you as its close.”

John Ruskin (1819–1900) English writer and art critic

Source: The Two Paths

Leo Tolstoy photo
Walker Percy photo
Jim Morrison photo
Suzanne Collins photo

“Dawn comes before sleep does.”

Source: Catching Fire

Brian Andreas photo
Rachel Caine photo
Malcolm Gladwell photo

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: Outliers: The Story of Success

Anne Lamott photo
Yoko Ono photo
Alfred Jarry photo

“Dawn was breaking, like the light from another world.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) French writer

Source: The Supermale

Charles, Prince of Wales photo

“I think it's something that dawns on you with the most ghastly, inexorable sense. I didn't suddenly wake up in my pram one day and say 'Yippee, I —', you know. But I think it just dawns on you, you know, slowly, that people are interested in one, and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.”

Charles, Prince of Wales (1948) son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

"The Prince of Wales: Full text of replies in radio debut", The Times, 3 March 1969, p. 3.
Asked when he had first realised that he was heir to the throne, in a Radio interview with Jack di Manio broadcast on 1 March 1969. This was the first time the Prince had appeared on radio.
1960s

Harry V. Jaffa photo

“Relativism, positivism, and nihilism — modern doctrines which mock wisdom and scorn virtue — have at the dawn of the twenty-first century come to dominate.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, Before In History (2004)

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 Thomson (B.V.) photo
Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Clothing the palpable and familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

The Death of Wallenstein, Act i, scene 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Garth Brooks photo
Radhanath Swami photo

“Lying down to sleep on the earthen riverbank, I thought, Vrindavan is attracting my heart like no other place. What is happening to me? Please reveal Your divine will. With this prayer, I drifted off to sleep.
Before dawn, I awoke to the ringing of temple bells, signaling that it was time to begin my journey to Hardwar. But my body lay there like a corpse. Gasping in pain, I couldn’t move. A blazing fever consumed me from within, and under the spell of unbearable nausea, my stomach churned. Like a hostage, I lay on that riverbank. As the sun rose, celebrating a new day, I felt my life force sinking. Death that morning would have been a welcome relief. Hours passed.
At noon, I still lay there. This fever will surely kill me, I thought.
Just when I felt it couldn’t get any worse, I saw in the overcast sky something that chilled my heart. Vultures circled above, their keen sights focused on me. It seemed the fever was cooking me for their lunch, and they were just waiting until I was well done. They hovered lower and lower. One swooped to the ground, a huge black and white bird with a long, curving neck and sloping beak. It stared, sizing up my condition, then jabbed its pointed beak into my ribcage. My body recoiled, my mind screamed, and my eyes stared back at my assailant, seeking pity. The vulture flapped its gigantic wings and rejoined its fellow predators circling above. On the damp soil, I gazed up at the birds as they soared in impatient circles. Suddenly, my vision blurred and I momentarily blacked out. When I came to, I felt I was burning alive from inside out. Perspiring, trembling, and gagging, I gave up all hope.
Suddenly, I heard footsteps approaching. A local farmer herding his cows noticed me and took pity. Pressing the back of his hand to my forehead, he looked skyward toward the vultures and, understanding my predicament, lifted me onto a bullock cart. As we jostled along the muddy paths, the vultures followed overhead. The farmer entrusted me to a charitable hospital where the attendants placed me in the free ward. Eight beds lined each side of the room. The impoverished and sadhu patients alike occupied all sixteen beds. For hours, I lay unattended in a bed near the entrance. Finally that evening the doctor came and, after performing a series of tests, concluded that I was suffering from severe typhoid fever and dehydration. In a matter-of-fact tone, he said, “You will likely die, but we will try to save your life.””

Radhanath Swami (1950) Gaudiya Vaishnava guru

Republished on The Journey Home website.
The Journey Home: Autobiography of an American Swami (Tulsi Books, 2010)

C. V. Raman photo
Simone Weil photo
Megan Mullally photo
Catharine A. MacKinnon photo

“So the idea that there is nothing essential, in the sense that there are no human universals, is dogma. Ask most anyone who is going to be shot at dawn.”

Catharine A. MacKinnon (1946) American feminist and legal activist

"Postmodernism and Human Rights" (2000), p. 53
Are Women Human?: and Other International Dialogues (2006)

Joel Barlow photo
E.E. Cummings photo
J. M. Barrie photo
R. Venkataraman photo

“Unfortunately, people in office develop a rigidity or a false sense of prestige that the Government should not yield to pressure. I was no exception to it during my earlier career in charge of vital departments. Wisdom dawns when it is too late or the situation is beyond redemption.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 161-62.

“Let hopes and sorrows, fears and angers be,
And think each day that dawns the last you'll see;
For so the hour that greets you unforeseen
Will bring with it enjoyment twice as keen.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Book I, epistle iv, p. 108
Translations, The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (1869), Epistles

Thomas Buchanan Read photo

“We bring roses, beautiful fresh roses,
Dewy as the morning and colored like the dawn.”

Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872) American artist

The new pastoral Book.

Diane Ackerman photo

“What would dawn have been like, had you awakened? It would have sung through your bones. All I can do this morning is let it sing through mine.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Silence and Awakening
The Inevitable: Contemporary Writer Confront Death (2011) Edited by David Shields & Bradford Morrow

Erik Satie photo
Glen Cook photo

“Dawn comes early when you wish it would not. The hours flash when you want them to drag.”

Source: The White Rose (1985), Chapter 56, “Time Fading” (p. 686)

Gene Wolfe photo

“The true dawn of adulthood, of intellectual maturity, if you like, is the realization that adults are all fools.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"The Pirates of Florida and Other Impossibilities", speech at the Conference on the Fantastic (1991), as published in Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

James A. Michener photo
James A. Michener photo
Thomas Hood photo
Alfred Noyes photo
William Ernest Henley photo
Mike Oldfield photo
George William Russell photo
Henry Adams photo

“The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

John Gardiner Calkins Brainard photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus photo

“Prayed for so oft, the dawn of fight is come.
No more entreat the gods: with sword in hand
Seize on our fates; and Caesar in your deeds
This day is great or little.”

Nil opus est uotis, iam fatum accersite ferro. in manibus uestris, quantus sit Caesar, habetis.

Book VII, line 252 (tr. E. Ridley).
Pharsalia

Lyndon B. Johnson photo
Arthur Schopenhauer photo
Muhammad of Ghor photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 60 et seq.

This is a reference to Dante's Inferno, Canto III, lines 55-57

Garth Brooks photo

“He asked her twice to come along;
They said good-bye at the break of dawn.
'Cause you can't hold back the wind,
If it's meant to be again,
Then someday he'll find his way back to her arms.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

That Ol' Wind, written by Leigh Reynolds and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Fresh Horses (1995)