Quotes about fog (145 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“I chose none to ask
why the wind was blowing there
chasing the fogs”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> Khorampa https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/khorampa/</span>
From Poetry

“We are the pilots of our life, we only know how to manage life. But from time to time, the fog prevents us from performing incredible tricks.”

Nikita Vasilyevich Smirnov (28)

Time , Life

“Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Love , Reality

“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog -- the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Faith , Reality

“Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn't go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 4

People , Drink , Beer

“God give us men. The time demands
Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue
And dam his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-browned, who live above the fog
In public duty and in private thinking.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland Wanted

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

Men , God , Lie , Faith

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair, hover through fog and filthy air.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Variant: Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Source: Macbeth

“It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more. Its the foghorn I hate. It won't let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 100-101 (Act 3)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)
Source: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Love , Hate , World , Feeling

“Lampposts look
in the glow of their defeated light
robbed by the fog
but cannot tell
if the streets
lying by stretching limbs in courtyards
are sleeping face downwards or supine.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

<span class="plainlinks"> In Midnight Street http://www.prachyareview.com/poems-by-suman-pokhrel/</span>
From Poetry

Lying , Sleep , Light

“How thick the fog is. I can't see the road. All the people in the world could pass by and I would never know. I wish it was always that way. It's getting dark already. It will soon be night, thank goodness.”

Eugene O'Neill Long Day's Journey into Night

Page 104 (Act 3)
Long Day's Journey into Night (1955)

People , World , Way , Night

“Oh Portugal, today you are fog…
The Hour has come!”

Fernando Pessoa book Mensagem

Poem "Nevoeiro", verse 13-14
Message
Original: Ó Portugal, hoje és nevoeiro...
É a Hora!

“An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Endymion (1880), Ch. 37.

Country

“Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 98
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Há sensações que são sonos, que ocupam como uma névoa toda a extensão do espírito, que não deixam pensar, que não deixam agir, que não deixam claramente ser.

Thinking , Sleep

“I think we're all a bunch of weirdos on a quest to belong. The songs are echolocation up in impregnable fog.”

Aesop Rock (1976) American rapper

"Dorks" from the album The Impossible Kid.

Thinking

“… behind me there were ghosts of people like a trailing fog as far as I could see - grandfathers of grandfathers and grandmothers of grandmothers without number.”

Black Elk (1863–1950) Oglala Lakota leader

Black Elk Speaks (1961)

People

“Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face.
.......
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old;
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

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

Life , Death , Fear , Feeling

“This is Alberich's dream come true — Nibelheim, world dominion, activity, work, everywhere the oppressive feeling of steam and fog.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

25 May 1877, quoting Richard's impressions of London
Cosima Wagner's Diaries (1978)

World , Dreams , Feeling

“A luminous body when obscured by a dense atmosphere will appear smaller; as may be seen by the moon or sun veiled by fogs.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance

Appearance , Sun

“I was very sad; for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me, little as I was, for I was only nine years old. Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.”

Black Elk (1863–1950) Oglala Lakota leader

Black Elk Speaks (1961)
Context: They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life. I knew it was the Grandfathers in the Flaming Rainbow Tepee who had cured me; but I felt afraid to say so. My father gave Whirlwind Chaser the best horse he had for making me well, and many people came to look at me, and there was much talk about the great power of Whirlwind Chaser who had made me well all at once when I was almost the same as dead.
Everybody was glad that I was living; but as I lay there thinking about the wonderful place where I had been and all that I had seen, I was very sad; for it seemed to me that everybody ought to know about it, but I was afraid to tell, because I knew that nobody would believe me, little as I was, for I was only nine years old. Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.
I am sure now that I was then too young to understand it all, and that I only felt it. It was the pictures I remembered and the words that went with them; for nothing I have ever seen with my eyes was so clear and bright as what my vision showed me; and no words that I have ever heard with my ears were like the words I heard. I did not have to remember these things; they have remembered themselves all these years. It was as I grew older that the meanings came clearer and clearer out of the pictures and the words; and even now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell.

Sadness , Feeling , Thinking , Parting

“The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: The pride connected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within themselves something of the same deceitful character.

Men , Sense

“The future is a fog that is still hanging out over the sea, a boat that floats home or does not.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters

Home , Future , Sea

“Today is mine. Tomorrow is none of my business. If I peer anxiously into the fog of the future, I will strain my spiritual eyes so that I will not see clearly what is required of me now.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

Source: Keep a Quiet Heart

Business , Future

“His whole life was now summed up in two words: absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Life

“I must go in, the fog is rising.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“Ah, Los Angeles! Dust and fog of your lonely streets. I am no longer lonely. Just you wait, all of you ghosts of this room, just you wait, because it will happen yet, and that Camilla, she can have her Sammy in the desert, with his cheap short stories and stinking prose, but wait until she has a taste of me, because it will happen, as sure as there's a God in heaven.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939)

God , Angels , Waiting

“It was a lesson most people learned much earlier; that even friendship could have an undisclosed shelf life. That loyalty and affection, so consuming and powerful, could dissipate like fog.”

Jennifer Haigh (1968) Novelist

Source: The Condition

Life , Friendship , People , Learning

“You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Pain , Appearance

“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Dance

“The fog is clearing; life is a matter of taste.”

Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) German playwright

Source: Spring's Awakening

Life

“You never realized how thick your fog was until it lifted.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Reborn

“Luke moved as silently as fog, while Maryse's heels sounded like gunshots on the marble floor. Clary wondered if Isabelle's propensity for unsuitable footwear was genetic.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“Now it's like a fog has lifted. I sense Leetu just as clearly as I can see the moon.'
Your eyes are closed, and the moon as a haze around it.”

Donita K. Paul (1950) American writer

Source: DragonSpell

Sense

“Tell me what’s the difference
between hope and waiting
because my heart doesn’t know
It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting
It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope”

Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986) Poet, writer and translator

Hope , Waiting , Heart

“And when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight.”

Jack Kerouac book Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

Beauty , Star , Night

“Desire is like fog on a bathroom mirror -- its presence incites you to wipe the mirror, and see yourself clearly again.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

People

“There are your fog people & your sun people, he said. I said I wasn't sure which kind I was. He nodded. Fog'll do that to you, he said.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

People , Sun

“How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.”

John Ashbery (1927–2017) poet from the United States

People , Light , Time , Parting

“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Source: The Light That Failed [Illustrated]

Summer

“The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into…

A monkey?

I think not.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Thinking , Tree

“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.”

Raymond Chandler book The Big Sleep

Source: The Big Sleep

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

People , Disappointment , Star

“The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches, and then moves on.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

"Fog" (1916)

Cats

“[Nelson, to Annabelle] "The misery of the world," he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. "That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up…"”

John Updike book Rabbit Remembered

Rabbit Remembered (2000)

World , Soul , Thinking

“There are buildings which will hold a few, but which will break down under the weight of a crowd. The ice of the river may be strong enough to bear a man, but would break through under the weight of an elephant. The ice under us in this country is very thin, and is made very weak by the warm fogs of prejudice… Our policy should be to unite with the great mass of the American people in all their activities, and resolve to fall or flourish with our common country. We cannot afford to draw the color-line in politics, trade, education, manners, religion, fashion, or civilization. Especially we cannot afford to draw the color-line in politics. No folly could be greater. A party acting on that basis would be not merely a misfortune, but a dire calamity to our people.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

People , Education , Religion , Color

“You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention—it's about diet, not diabetes. It's going to be very, very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

Nancy Pelosi (1940) American politician, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, born 1940

9 March, 2010. Source: http://www.slate.com/id/2279128/ Having to pass a bill to know what is does is a Grin and Bear It cartoon punchline http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/john-roberts-obamacare-cartoon from 1947, paraphased in a 1948 Indiana Law Journal article by then Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3871&context=ilj Frankfurter was in turn cited in 2015's decision in King v. Burwell, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, which turned on a complication in the very law resulting from the bill Pelosi was above describing. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-114_qol1.pdf
2010s

Health , Future

“I feel a great deal of sympathy for the families of the four brave Americans that we lost at Benghazi. And I certainly can’t even imagine the grief that she has for losing her son, but she’s wrong. She’s absolutely wrong. I and everybody in the administration, all the people she named, the president, the vice president, Susan Rice, we were scrambling to get information that was changing, literally by the hour. And when we had information, we made it public. But then sometimes we had to go back and say we have new information that contradicts it. So I testified for 11 hours. … We have captured one of the lead terrorists and he admits it was both a terrorist attack and it was influenced by the video. This was fog of war. This was complicated. The most effective, comprehensive reports and studies demonstrate that. … I deeply regret that we lost four Americans. And I of course sympathize with members of the families who are still, you know, very much grieving. And I wish that there could be an easy answer at the time, but we learned a lot, and the intelligence kept improving, and we learned enough to say what we think happened at Benghazi.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

War , People , Family , Feeling

“Surely, Shakespeare is wicked and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum"
Ruins and Visions (1942)

Love , Children , Time , Sun

“Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

As quoted by Barbara Gamarekian in Working Profile: Daniel J. Boorstin. Helping the Library of Congress Fulfill Its Mission http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/06/specials/boorstin-working.html, The New York Times (July 8, 1983).

Knowledge

“To those who doubt and deny the preponderance of good over evil in human nature; who think the few are made to rule, and the many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity; who attach more importance to ancient forms than to the living realities of the present; who worship power in whatever hands it may be lodged and by whatever means it may have been obtained; our government is a mountain of sin, and, what is worse, it seems confirmed in its transgressions. One of the latest and most potent European prophets, one who felt himself called upon for a special deliverance concerning us and our destiny as a nation, was the late Thomas Carlyle. He described us as rushing to ruin, and when we may expect to reach the terrible end, our gloomy prophet, enveloped in the fogs of London, has not been pleased to tell us. Warning and advice from any quarter are not to be despised, and especially not from one so eminent as Mr. Carlyle; and yet Americans will find it hard to heed even men like him, while the animus is so apparent, bitter and perverse.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men , Mountain , Nature , Thinking

“I sit cross-legged on the rock
The valleys and streams are cold and damp
Sitting quietly is beautiful
The cliffs are lost in mist and fog
I rest happily in this place
At dusk the tree shadows are low
I look into my mind
A white lotus emerges from the dark mud”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Beauty , Tree

“I dreamed a place where I have come to dwell
Cold Mountain says it all
Monkeys scream, the valley fog is cold
My door blends with the color of the peaks
I gather leaves and thatch a hut among the pines
Dig a pond and lead a trickle from the brook
Long ago I left the world behind
Eating ferns I pass the years in peace”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World , Peace , Dreams , Color

“The artist makes art not to save mankind but to save himself. Every benevolent comment by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 29

Art , Reality

“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

“The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Night (1960)

Fate , Hope , Soul , Thinking

“It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Victory: An Island Tale http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6378/6378-h/6378-h.htm (1915), Part II, ch. 3

World

“There is a place,
List, daughter! in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires;
A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness; in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths.”

John Ford (dramatist) (1586–1639) dramatist

Act III, sc. v.
Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629-33?)

Death , Sun , Daughters

“The Saviour who flitted before the patriarchs through the fog of the old dispensation, and who spake in time past to the fathers by the prophets, articulate but unseen, is the same Saviour who, on the open heights of the gospel, and in the abundant daylight of this New Testament, speaks to us. Still all along it is the same Jesus, and that Bible is from beginning to end, all of it, the word of Christ.”

James Hamilton (1814–1867) Scottish minister and a prolific author of religious tracts

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 32.

Time , Past , Christ

“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.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

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

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

Death , Winter

“The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 19–24.

Soul , Sense , Night

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Epigraph
The October Country (1955)

People , Autumn , Thinking , Sun

“War is time that has marched through the mind, and is later presented in
such a way that boots are the be-all and end-all.
Thus it is important to teach the soldier exactly how to treat the ghosts, how
to address the fog, or
how time and space appear on paper to describe absolutely everything.
Do not say that was true in antiquity, as there the same sentence changed
many times, petrified into mountains,
precisely where it was open…”

Paavo Haavikko (1931–2008) Finnish poet and writer from 20th century

Paavo Haavikko, in: John Taylor (2010), Into the Heart of European Poetry. p. 329

War , Way , Mountain , Appearance

“Beloved, I congratulate you, that you are at the feast of redeeming love, that you know the riches of grace in Christ Jesus; but this is only the "early meal" (introductory feast); the " grand supper "is awaiting you, at the close of the day, in the palace of the King, where the fellowship will be perfect and eternal, where the table will be beyond all the mists and fogs of sin, where death never enters to disturb the festivities, and where we shall see the Lamb face to face. O! if the feast with Jesus here is so precious, what, what must heaven be!”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 372.

Love , Death , Christ , Perfection

“After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, "Oh, this pace is terrible!" But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.”

Shunryu Suzuki book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Pt. 1 : Right Practice, "Bowing"
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1973)

Idea

“The whole landscape lies behind the transparent gauze of the fog that now rises, drawn upwards by the sun, and as it rises, reveals the silver-spangled river, the fields, the cottages, the further scene. At last one can discern all that one could only guess at before... The sun is up! There is a peasant at the end of the field, with his wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen... Everything is bursting into life, sparkling in the full light – light, which as yet is still soft and golden. The background, simple in line and harmonious in colour, melts into the infinite expanse of sky, through the bluish, misty atmosphere. The flowers raise their heads the birds flutter hither and thither... The little rounded willows on the bank of the stream look like birds spreading their tails. It's adorable! And one paints! And paints!”

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

Corot's description of a morning 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

Life , Flowers , Bird , Light

“Oh, dear no, miss," he said. "This is a London particular." I had never heard of such a thing. "A fog, miss," said the young gentleman. "Oh, indeed!”

Charles Dickens book Bleak House

said I.
Source: Bleak House (1852-1853), Ch. 3

“…the American's upper yards and punctured sails rose above the fog of gunfire like a cliff.”

Douglas Reeman (1924–2017) British author

For My Country's Freedom, Cap 11 "Like Father, Like Son"

“The day after your departure I started a new painting at Le Cours-la-Reine, in the afternoon in a glow of sun, and another in the morning by the water below St. Paul's Church. These two canvases are fairly well advanced, but I still need one session in fine weather without too much mist to give them a little firmness. Until now I have not been able to find the effect I want, I have even been forced to change the effect a bit, which is always dangerous. I have also an effect of fog... Until now I have not been able to find the effect I want, I have even been forced to change the effect a bit, which is always dangerous. I have also an effect of fog, another, same effect, from my window, the same motif in the rain, several sketches in oils, done on the quays near the boats; the next day it was impossible to go on, everything was confused, the motifs no longer existed; one has to realize them in a single session.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote in a letter from Rouen 11 October 1883, to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 42
1880's

Departure , Water , Change , Sun

“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!"”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
Source: The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 4

Love , Education , Way , Soul

“Sweet Phosphor, bring the day
Whose conquering ray
May chase these fogs;
Sweet Phosphor, bring the day!

Sweet Phosphor, bring the day!
Light will repay
The wrongs of night;
Sweet Phosphor, bring the day!”

Francis Quarles (1592–1644) English poet

Book I, no. 14.
Emblems (1635)

Light , Night

“One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."”

Michael Frayn (1933) British writer

James Fenton (ed.) The Original Michael Frayn (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1983) p. 67.

Imagination

“A deep fog of obscurity is thrown about war by the use of misleading and confusing terms.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Must We Go to War? (1937)

War

“He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (p. 37)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

World , Color , Sense , Learning

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last and First Men

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Fate , People , Pleasure , Youth

“Poor juvenile solutions, explaining nothing. No need then for caution, we may reason on to our heart’s content, the fog won’t lift.”

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) Irish novelist, playwright, and poet

The Expelled (1946)

Heart

“A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven….”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

Source: Literary Years and War (1900-1918), The Riddle Of The Sands (1903), p. 217.

“Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs… They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. … For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.”

David Brooks (1961) American journalist, commentator and editor

[David, Brooks, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/837uvzrs.asp?pg=2, Saddam's Brain, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002, May 24, 2011]
2000s

War , People , World , Peace

“Have you seen a room from which faith has gone?…Like a marriage from which love has gone…And patience, patience everywhere like a fog.”

Graham Greene The Potting Shed

The Potting Shed (1957)

Love , Marriage , Faith , Patience

“Depression is seductive: it offends and teases, frightens you and draws you in, tempting you with its promise of sweet oblivion, then overwhelming you with a nearly sexual power, squirming past your defenses, dissolving your will, invading the tired spirit so utterly that it becomes difficult to recall that you ever lived without it… or to imagine that you might live that way again. With all the guile of Satan himself, depression persuades you that its invasion was all your own idea, that you wanted it all along. It fogs the part of the brain that reasons, that knows right and wrong. It captures you with its warm, guilty, hateful pleasures, and, worst of all, it becomes familiar. All at once, you find yourself in thrall to the very thing that most terrifies you. Your work slides, your friendships slide, your marriage slides, but you scarcely notice: to be depressed is to be half in love with disaster.”

Stephen L. Carter book The Emperor of Ocean Park

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 12, A Special Delivery, II

Love , Hate , Friendship , Marriage

“She was forcing it with her scorn, the kiss she gave me, the hard curl of her lips, the mockery of her eyes, until I was like a man made of wood and there was no feeling within me except terror and a fear of her, a sense that her beauty was too much, that she was so much more beautiful than I, deeper rooted than I. She made me a stranger unto myself, she was all of those calm nights and tall eucalyptus trees, the desert stars, that land and sky, that fog outside, and I had come there with no purpose save to be a mere writer, to get money, to make a name for myself and all that piffle.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money , Fear , Beauty , Feeling

“The Christian fog of self deception still does its damage: we either deceive ourselves by pretending to believe or overreact into a contempt of all religion. So, away with the fog!”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

The Universe of Experience: A Worldview Beyond Science and Religion (1974)

Religion

“The neurotic circles ceaselessly above a fogged-in airport.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

“Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1920s, A Peck of Gold (1926)

Children , Sea

“Daylight came creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

World , Feeling , Time , Hurt

“This was the custom of the tribes, and perhaps, in the fogs of their pasts, the scheme had had its reasons. Yet like many of their ways, only the peel remained, the fruit was long gone.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book One, Part I “The Krarl”, Chapter 4 (p. 31)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Way , Past

“The major enemy of poker players is their rationalizations for their failures to think…. Many poor players evade thinking by letting their minds sink into irrational fogs. Their belief in luck short-circuits their minds by excusing them from their responsibility to think. Belief in luck is a great mystical rationalization for the refusal to think.”

Frank R. Wallace (1932–2006) Philosopher, author, entrepreneur

Wallace, Frank R. Poker: A Guaranteed Income for Life by Using the Advanced Concepts of Poker. Quoted in A Friendly Game of Poker by Ira Glass and Jake Austen, Chicago Review Press, 2003, page 210

Failure , Thinking