Quotes about frost (135 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“If the campaign is in summer the general must show himself greedy for his share of the sun and the heat, and in winter for the cold and the frost, and in all labours for toil and fatigue. This will help to make him beloved of his followers.”

Xenophon book Cyropaedia

Bk. 1, ch. 6; as translated by Henry Graham Dakyns in Cyropaedia (2004) p. 31.
Cyropaedia, 4th Century BC

Winter , Sun , Help , Summer

“Love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Men

Source: Little Men

Love , Flowers , Autumn , Winter

“David Frost: What would you like people to think about you when you've gone?
Muhammad Ali: I'd like for them to say:
He took a few cups of love.
He took one tablespoon of patience,
One teaspoon of generosity,
One pint of kindness.
He took one quart of laughter,
One pinch of concern.
And then, he mixed willingness with happiness.
He added lots of faith,
And he stirred it up well.
Then he spread it over a span of a lifetime,
And he served it to each and every deserving person he met.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

"Recipe of life" video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7iPACdA1HQ
Interview with David Frost (1974)

Love , People , Faith , Thinking

“Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens;
I come to lead you to the other shore,
To the eternal shades in heat and frost.”

Dante Alighieri book Inferno

Canto III, lines 85–87 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Hope

“I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

As quoted "Words of the Week" in Jet magazine, Vol. 64, No. 6 (25 April 1983), p. 40
Context: Music has been around a long time, and there's going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it's a big record, that's the frosting on the cake, but music's the main meal.

Music

“Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow — no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life — for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken — I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. There I sat.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard, section IX
The Waves (1931)

Tree , Hate , Making love , Sun

“Imitate the oak trees, stripped naked by the dark winter frost; who recover in the spring to resemble a powerful towering statue of emerald; and relate to its origin, consisting of soil, clouds, and dead plants.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1979

Tree , Dead , Spring , Relation ships

“Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff;
Life and these lips have long been separated:
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

Life , Death , Flowers

“Why, what's the matter,
That you have such a February face,
So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

“Hobson perceived with some alarm that bears were very numerous in the neighbourhood and that scarcely a day passed without one or more of them being sighted. Sometimes these unwelcome visitors belonged to the family of brown bears, so common throughout the whole "Cursed Land"; but now and then a solitary specimen of the formidable Polar bear warned the hunters what dangers they might have to encounter as soon as the first frost should drive great numbers of these fearful animals to the neighborhood of Cape Bathurst. Every book of Arctic explorations is full of accounts of the frequent perils in which travelers and whalers are exposed from the ferocity of these animals.”

Jules Verne book The Fur Country

Hobson constata, non sans une certaine appréhension, que les ours étaient nombreux sur cette partie du territoire. Il était rare, en effet, qu'un jour se passât sans qu'un couple de ces formidables carnassiers ne fût signalé. Bien des coups de fusil furent adressés à ces terribles visiteurs. Tantôt, c'était une bande de ces ours bruns qui sont fort communs sur toute la région de la Terre-Maudite, tantôt, une de ces familles d'ours polaires d'une taille gigantesque, que les premiers froids amèneraient sans doute en plus grand nombre aux environs du cap Bathurst. Et, en effet, dans les récits d'hivernage, on peut observer que les explorateurs ou les baleiniers sont plusieurs fois par jour exposés à la rencontre de ces carnassiers.
Source: The Fur Country, or Seventy Degrees North Latitude (1872), Ch. 14: Some Excursions

Books , Fear , Family , Travel

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that we've enjoyed some good times this evening, and enjoyed some laughter together, I feel it is my obligation to remind you of some of the negative, depressing, dangerous, life-threatening things that life is really all about; things you have not been thinking about tonight, but which will be waiting for you as soon as you leave the theater or as soon as you turn off your television sets. Anal rape, quicksand, body lice, evil spirits, gridlock, acid rain, continental drift, labor violence, flash floods, rabies, torture, bad luck, calcium deficiency, falling rocks, cattle stampedes, bank failure, evil neighbors, killer bees, organ rejection, lynching, toxic waste, unstable dynamite, religious fanatics, prickly heat, price fixing, moral decay, hotel fires, loss of face, stink bombs, bubonic plague, neo-Nazis, friction, cereal weevils, failure of will, chain reaction, soil erosion, mail fraud, dry rot, voodoo curse, broken glass, snake bite, parasites, white slavery, public ridicule, faithless friends, random violence, breach of contract, family scandals, charlatans, transverse myelitis, structural defects, race riots, sunspots, rogue elephants, wax buildup, killer frost, jealous coworkers, root canals, metal fatigue, corporal punishment, sneak attacks, peer pressure, vigilantes, birth defects, false advertising, ungrateful children, financial ruin, mildew, loss of privileges, bad drugs, ill-fitting shoes, widespread chaos, Lou Gehrig's disease, stray bullets, runaway trains, chemical spills, locusts, airline food, shipwrecks, prowlers, bathtub accidents, faulty merchandise, terrorism, discrimination, wrongful cremation, carbon deposits, beef tapeworm, taxation without representation, escaped maniacs, sunburn, abandonment, threatening letters, entropy, nine-mile fever, poor workmanship, absentee landlords, solitary confinement, depletion of the ozone layer, unworthiness, intestinal bleeding, defrocked priests, loss of equilibrium, disgruntled employees, global warming, card sharks, poisoned meat, nuclear accidents, broken promises, contamination of the water supply, obscene phone calls, nuclear winter, wayward girls, mutual assured destruction, rampaging moose, the greenhouse effect, cluster headaches, social isolation, Dutch elm disease, the contraction of the universe, paper cuts, eternal damnation, the wrath of God, and PARANOIAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Playing With Your Head (1986)

Life , God , Bad luck , Children

“Through wind, hail or frost my living's made.
I am a lecher, and she's a lecher with me.
Which one of us is better? We're both alike:
The one as worthy as the other. Bad rat, bad cat.
We both love filth, and filth pursues us;
We flee from honor, honor flees from us,
In this brothel where we ply our trade.”

Francois Villon book Le Testament

Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit.
Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit.
L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat.
Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit;
Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
Source: Le Grand Testament (The Great Testament) (1461), Line 1621; "Ballade de la Grosse Margot (Ballade for Fat Margot)".

Love , Cats

“The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death.”

Roy Campbell (poet) (1901–1957) South African poet

"The Sisters," lines 13-14
Adamastor (1930)

Love , Death , Kiss

“O mortals, from your fellows' blood abstain,
Nor taint your bodies with a food profane:
While corn, and pulse by Nature are bestow'd,
And planted orchards bend their willing load;
While labour'd gardens wholesom herbs produce,
And teeming vines afford their gen'rous juice;
Nor tardier fruits of cruder kind are lost,
But tam'd with fire, or mellow'd by the frost;
While kine to pails distended udders bring,
And bees their hony redolent of Spring;
While Earth not only can your needs supply,
But, lavish of her store, provides for luxury;
A guiltless feast administers with ease,
And without blood is prodigal to please.”
Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis corpora! sunt fruges, sunt deducentia ramos pondere poma suo tumidaeque in vitibus uvae, sunt herbae dulces, sunt quae mitescere flamma mollirique queant; nec vobis lacteus umor eripitur, nec mella thymi redolentia florem: prodiga divitias alimentaque mitia tellus suggerit atque epulas sine caede et sanguine praebet.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Book XV, 75–82 (from Wikisource); on vegetarianism, as the following quote
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Food , Spring , Nature , Bee

“Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry — God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Vikinga berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares — aye — I speak truly — for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (3 May 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 227
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

God , Mountain , Nature

“Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early Frost.”

Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) American poet

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

Children , Flowers , Summer

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien book The Fellowship of the Ring

Source: The Fellowship of the Ring, Poem Riddle of Strider

Light , Strong , Spring

“Once, long ago in her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love.
Sunshine on ice.
She warms his frost. He cools her fever.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Love , World , Spring , Winter

“Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white.”

Jim Butcher Small Favor

Variant: Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?"

"Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead, I said solemnly, and frosting of white.
Source: Small Favor

“Katniss: I guess all those hours decorating cakes paid off.
Peeta: Yes, frosting. The final defence of the dying. (252)”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

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

Jack Kerouac Book of Haikus

Source: Book of Haikus

Winter

“Frosting

Freedom
Is just frosting
On somebody else's
Cake--
And so must be
Till we
Learn how to
Bake.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Source: The Panther and the Lash

Freedom , Learning

“It's lovely. If only you could frost someone to death."

"Don't be so superior. You can never tell what you will find in the arena. Say it's a gigantic cake-”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Love , Death

“Ambrose, your presence is the horseshit frosting on the horseshit cake that is the admissions interview process.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Friendship , Soul

“We have a saying that time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun

Tear , Time

“He gave me a look sure to put frost on anyone's pumpkin.”

Charlaine Harris (1951) American writer

“Under the pink Harlequin sunglasses strawberry dangling charms, and sugar-frosted eyeshadow she was really almost beautiful.”

Francesca Lia Block Weetzie Bat

Source: Weetzie Bat

Beauty

“I’m the frosting on America’s cake, and tonight I’m willing to let you lick the bowl.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

“His face and arms are so artfully disguised as to be invisible. I kneel beside him. “I guess all those hours decorating cakes paid off.” Peeta smiles. “Yes, frosting. The final defense of the dying.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Smile

“When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Essays: First Series

Source: Essays: First Series

Friendship

“Mac reflected on the Unseelie King and his concubine:

He’d loved her for all time
After he’d believed she was gone
Sunshine to his ice.
Frost to her fever.
I wished them forever. The Unseelie King was gone.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Love , Time

“Roses. Wolf mutts. Tributes. Frosted Dolphins. Friends. Mockingjays. Stylists. Me. Everything screams in my dreams tonight.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Dreams , Wolf

“America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

People

“Yes, frosting. The final defense of the dying.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Catherine Earnshaw (Ch. IX).
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Love , Soul

“Finally, thank you very much to Jeaniene Frost and Jill Myles. This book does have sex in it. Please don't hit me anymore."

~Ilona Andrews in the Acknowledgements section of Magic Bleeds”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Books , Sex

“And you read your emily dickinson,
And I my robert frost.
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what weve lost.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Reading

“I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost… but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth
other poets. I want someone to mouth me.”

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

Sadness , Quotes

“Girl, he wants to dip you in Frosted Flakes and have you for breakfast. That's his favorite cereal, by the way." I… had no words for that.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

Way , Girl

“The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

Star , Flowers

“He frosted under heavy guard.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“I weep for Adonais — he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

St. I
Adonais (1821)

Tear , Dead

“Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Life , Beauty , Way , Home

“Men leave arms and legs behind, severed by the frost, and the cruel cold cuts off the limbs already broken.”
Abscisa relincunt membra gelu, fractosque asper rigor amputat artus.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book III, line 552–553
Punica

Men

“This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.”
Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, pp. 30–31
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Wisdom , World , Fear , Home

“I don’t need to praise anything so justly famous as Frost’s observation of and empathy with everything in Nature from a hornet to a hillside; and he has observed his own nature, one person’s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and perceptions, quite as well. (And this person, in the poems, is not the “alienated artist” cut off from everybody who isn’t, yum-yum, another alienated artist; he is someone like normal people only more so — a normal person in the less common and more important sense of normal.)”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Other Frost”, p. 29
Poetry and the Age (1953)

People , Feeling , Nature , Sense

“In the whole period, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, the greatest American poet is Stuart Merrill.”

Stuart Merrill (1863–1915) American poet, who wrote mostly in the French language

Kenneth Rexroth, as quoted in Ramez Qureshi on Stuart Merrill's The White Tomb: Selected Writing http://home.jps.net/~nada/merrill.htm
About

“So they march with sovereign tread…
Behind them limps the hungry dog,
and wrapped in wild snow at their head
carrying a blood-red flag
soft-footed where the blizzard swirls,
invulnerable where bullets crossed –
crowned with a crown of
snowflake pearls,
a flowery diadem of frost,
ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.”

Alexander Blok The Twelve

The Twelve (1918); translation from Jon Stallworthy and Peter France (trans.) The Twelve, and Other Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 160.

Dogs , Christ

“Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Books , Understanding , Appearance , Success

“"One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?"
Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl.
He asked: "You really want an answer?"
"I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being — yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order."”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967)

God , Thinking , Universe

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

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

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

Love , Home , Mountain , Star

“Were I laid on Greenland’s Coast,
And in my Arms embrac’d my Lass;
Warm amidst eternal Frost,
Too soon the Half Year’s Night would pass.”

John Gay (1685–1732) English poet and playwright

Act I, sc. xxxiii, air 16
The Beggar's Opera (1728)

Night

“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

John Fowles book The Collector

The Collector (1963)

Men , School , Home , Sister

“Michael Frost on Wikipedia”

Alan Hirsch (1959) South African missionary

External Links
Variant: Alan Hirsch on Wikipedia

“It was my idea to ‘frost’ the streak in the front. I was searching for a different look. Either be blonde or brunette. But don’t be brunette in the back and blonde in the front.”

June Vincent (1920–2008) actress

An Interview with June Vincent (1996)

Search , Idea

“Meanwhile these islands, stiff with cold and frost, and in a distant region of the world, remote from the visible sun, received the beams of light, that is, the holy precepts of Christ, the true Sun, showing to the whole world his splendour, not only from the temporal firmament, but from the height of heaven, which surpasses every thing temporal, at the latter part, as we know, of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, by whom his religion was propagated without impediment, and death threatened to those who interfered with its professors.”
Interea glaciali figore rigenti insulae et velut longiore terrarum secessu soli visibili non proximae verus ille non de firmamento solum temporali sed de summa etiam caelorum arce tempora cuncta excedente universo orbi praefulgidum sui coruscum ostendens, tempore, ut scimus, summo Tiberii Caesaris, quo absque ullo impedimento delatoribus militum eiusdem, radios suos primum indulget, id est sua praecepta, Christus.

Gildas De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae

Section 8.
De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain)

Death , World , Religion , Light

“When all my five and country senses see,
The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" When All My Five And Country Senses See http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Dylan_Thomas/1149" (1939)

Love , Star , Sense , Winter

“I get the willies when I see closed doors. Even at work, where I am doing so well now, the sight of a closed door is sometimes enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely; if I am tired and dejected from a night of lies or booze or sex or just nerves and insomnia, I can almost smell the disaster mounting invisibly and flooding out toward me through the frosted glass panes. My hands may perspire, and my voice may come out strange. I wonder why. Something must have happened to me sometime.”

Joseph Heller book Something Happened

Opening Lines
Something Happened (1974)

Sex , Night

“You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear.”

Paul Desmond (1924–1977) American jazz musician

His response to the annoying banality of an interviewer
Unsourced

“Before bed, the bright moon was shining.
Now, I think the ground has a frost covering.
I raise my head … to view the bright moon,
Then I lower my head … and I think of home.”

Li Bai Quiet Night Thought

"Thoughts on a Still Night" (静夜思); in Jean Ward's Li T'ai-po: Remembered (2008), p. 99
Variant: Variant translation:
Before my bed the moonlight glitters
Like frost upon the ground.
I look up to the mountain moon,
Look down and think of home.
Source: "Quiet Night Thought", in Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (2000), p. 723

Home , Thinking

“After a hard frost a man might wake in the morning and find he was breaking a covenant.”

William Henry Maule (1788–1858) British politician

Stokes v. Grissell (1854), 2 W. R. 466.

“David Frost: If you haven't got nuclear weapons, the choice in that situation would be to subject your forces to an unfair battle.
Neil Kinnock: Yes, what you're suggesting is that the alternatives are between the gesture, the threat, or the use of nuclear weapons, and surrender. In these circumstances the choice is posed, and this is a classical choice, between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Television interview with David Frost on TV-AM (24 May 1987); reported in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, "The British General Election of 1987" (Macmillan, 1987), p. 103.

Youth , Flowers

“[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even—“at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“To the Laodiceans”, p. 21
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)
Variant: [Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even—“at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.

Wisdom , Education , Faith , Hope

“I believe in Father Frost. But not too deeply. But anyway, you know, I'm not one of those people who are able to tell the kids that Father Frost does not exist.”

Dmitry Medvedev (1965) Russian Prime Minister and former president

telegraph.co.uk http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/9731278/Dmitry-Medvedev-muses-on-aliens-and-Vladimir-Putins-lateness.html

People

“Lucid gems are made of water; just as Crystal, which has been concreted from clear water, not always by a very great cold, as some used to judge, and by very hard frost, but sometimes by a less severe one, the nature of the soil fashioning it, the humour or juices being shut up in definite cavities, in the way in which spars are produced in mines.”

William Gilbert (astronomer) book De Magnete

English translation by Silvanus P. Thompson (1900).
De Magnete (1600)

Way , Fashion , Nature , Water

“In order that the mortar in the joints may not suffer from frosts, drench it with oil-dregs every year before winter begins. Thus treated, it will not let the hoarfrost enter it.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII, Chapter I, Sec. 6

Suffering , Winter

“Pitsand used in masonry dries quickly, the stucco coating is permanent, and the walls can support vaultings. I am speaking of sand fresh from the sandpits. For if it lies unused too long after being taken out, it is disintegrated by exposure to sun, moon, or hoar frost, and becomes earthy. So when mixed in masonry, it has no binding power on the rubble, which consequently settles and down comes the load which the walls can no longer support.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter IV, Sec. 3

Support , Sun

“Since 'tis certain that Earth and Jupiter have their Water and Clouds, there is no reason why the other Planets should be without them. I can't say that they are exactly of the same nature with our Water; but that they should be liquid their use requires, as their beauty does that they be clear. This Water of ours, in Jupiter or Saturn, would be frozen up instantly by reason of the vast distance of the Sun. Every Planet therefore must have its own Waters of such a temper not liable to Frost.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

Book I http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm, p. 27
Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Beauty , Nature , Water , Sun

“All these soft kinds [of stone] have the advantage that they can be easily worked as soon as they have been taken from the quarries. Under cover, they play their part well; but in open and exposed situations the frost and rime make them crumble, and they go to pieces. On the seacoast, too, the salt eats away and dissolves them, nor can they stand great heat either.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VII, Sec. 2

Parting

“I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" The Darkling Thrush http://www.poetry-online.org/hardy_the_darkling_thrush.htm" (1900), lines 1-8, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)

Winter

“The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.”

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

" Frost at Midnight http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Frost_at_Midnight.html", l. 1 (1798)

Secret

“Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

The People, Yes http://books.google.com/books?id=bCSu8UHz9EUC&q=%22Man's+life+A+candle+in+the+wind+hoar+frost+on+stone%22&pg=PA509#v=onepage (1936)

Life

“And takes forth a Caucasian herb, of potency sure beyond all others, sprung of the gore that dropped from the liver of Prometheus, and grass wind-nurtured, fostered and strengthened by that blood divine among snows and grisly frosts.”
Et, qua sibi fida magis vis nulla, Prometheae florem de sanguine fibrae promit nutritaque gramina monti, quae sacer ille nives inter tristesque pruinas durat alitque cruor.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 355–359

Grass

“Nothing was said. And on crawled the little procession in the direction of Summerhouses, men and animals, men-animals, five souls. The pale red sun grazed the surface of the moorland bluffs on this northern winter's morning which was really only an evening. And yet it was midday. The light gilded the clouds of snow flying over the moors so that they seemed one unbroken ocean of fire, one radiant fire of gold with streaming flames and glimmering smoke from east to west over the whole frozen expanse. Through this golden fire of frost, comparable in its magic to nothing but the most powerful and elaborate witchcraft of the Ballads, lay their homeward way.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

Men , Way , Soul , Light

“[On inspiration]: I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)

Way , Feeling , Idea , Thinking

“Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge book Frost at Midnight

"Frost at Midnight", l. 72 (1798)

Secret

“Its berries are red as a maiden's lip,
Its leaves are of changeless green;
And any thing changeless now, I wis,
Is somewhat rare to be seen.
The holly, which fall and frost has borne,
The holly's the wreath for a Christmas morn.”

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

(1st January 1831) Christmas Carol
The London Literary Gazette, 1831

Christmas

“The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race…”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Frost-Giant's Daughter" (1953)

Death , God , Silence , Sun

“All Marie was earth before it became marle, it is a kinde of clay ground, and chalke it selfe was marle before it became chalke. And that which is more, that which is yet chalke within the Matrix of the earth, wil in time harden into a white stone, And last of all, wheresoever there bee any stones that be subiect to calcination, they were first marle before they were stones, for otherwise by their calcination they could not possibly amend any barren grounds … Also chalke and lime, after the frostes have taken them, whereby they crumble into powder, do become good marle, and serve in stead thereof.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

Source: Diverse new Sorts of Soylenot yet brought into any publique Use, 1594, p. 23-24; Cited in: Malcolm Thick (1994)

Bee , Time

“These drugs have side effects that go on for fuckin' days, like tendency-to-grow-another-head, oh my God! When we were growing up we knew the side effects of the drugs we were taking. Cocaine, side effects were paranoia, ninjas-on-the-lawn; quaaludes, side effects were talking in tongues, English as a second language; marijuana, side effects were laughter, Frosted Flakes.”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

Weapons of Self Destruction (2010)

God , Laughter , Marijuana

“Nature appears to us in four seasons. The spring is bright and warm, the summer lazy and hot. The fall is decked with colour with a trace of sadness, and the winter frosted and severe. Similarly, the movement of shin shin toitsu aikido are rich and varied. There is both severity and kindness, speed and calmness. It is designed to express the many moods and characteristics of men and women, young and old. But if it for one moment varies from the principles of the universe, it is no longer aikido with ki.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

23
Ki Sayings (2003)

Women , Men , Sadness , Spring

“Warmth, warmth, more warmth! for we are dying of cold and not of darkness. It is not the night that kills, but the frost.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), XI : The Practical Problem

Night

“Do these things for the sake of your country during the war. Do them for the sake of your country after the war. When the smoke of this great conflict has been dissolved in the atmosphere we breathe there will reappear a new Britain. It will be the old country still, but it will be a new country. Its commerce will be new, its trade will be new, its industries will be new. There will be new conditions of life and of toil, for capital and for labour alike, and there will be new relations between both of them and for ever. (Cheers.) But there will be new ideas, there will be a new outlook, there will be a new character in the land. The men and women of this country will be burnt into fine building material for the new Britain in the fiery kilns of the war. It will not merely be the millions of men who, please God! will come back from the battlefield to enjoy the victory which they have won by their bravery—a finer foundation I would not want for the new country, but it will not be merely that—the Britain that is to be will depend also upon what will be done now by the many more millions who remain at home. There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years the character, the destiny, of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft spring time. There are many storms to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Loud cheers.
Speech in his constituency of Carnavon Boroughs (3 February 1917), quoted in The Times (5 February 1917), p. 12
Prime Minister

Life , Women , Men , God

“Romantic Switzerland! thy scenes are traced
With characters of strange wild loveliness,
Beauty and desolation, side by side;
Here lofty rocks uprise, where nature seems
To dwell alone in silent majesty;
Rob'd by the snow, her stately palace fram'd
Of the white hills; towering in all their pride,
The frost's gigantic mounds are lost in clouds,
Like to vast castles rear'd in middle air.
The ice has sculptur'd too strange imagery—
Obelisks, columns, spires, fantastic piles;
Some like the polish'd marble, others clear
As the rock crystal, others sparkling with
The hues that melt along the sunborn bow.”

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

Canto I, I opening lines
The Fate of Adelaide (1821)

Beauty , Nature

“Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.”

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

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

Flowers

“Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The Living Temple, p. 186

Children , Confidence , Kiss , Winter

“The Frost looked forth one still, clear night,
And he said, "Now I shall be out of sight;
So through the valley and over the height
In silence I'll take my way."”

Hannah Flagg Gould (1788–1865) American writer

Cited by Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The Frost

Way , Silence , Night

“One thinks with awe and longing of this real and extraordinary popularity of hers [Edna St. Vincent Millay’s]: if there were some poet—Frost, Stevens, Eliot—whom people still read in canoes!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 329
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

People , Thinking , Reading

“Put forth thy leaf, thou lofty plane,
East wind and frost are safely gone;
With zephyr mild and balmy rain
The summer comes serenely on;
Earth, air, and sun and skies combine
To promise all that’s kind and fair:
But thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, contain thyself, and bear.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

In a London Square http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/londonsquare.html, st. 1.

Sun , Heart , Summer

“…men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (1903)

Men , Dogs , Strong

“The Maple puts her corals on in May,
While loitering frosts about the lowlands cling,
To be in tune with what the robins sing.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Sonnet, The Maple http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/archive/lowell.mhtml (1875)

Singing

“I wonder if anyone always knows-you, me, Jackie Robinson, even Robert Frost-that we will cross to Safety. Or is it rather that when we are There, we think we always knew?”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 82

Thinking

“O Mighty King! The perils of the sword,
Or fire, or frost, I nothing estimate;
But much I grieve that life must circumscribe
The limits of my zeal.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Ó Rei subido,
Aventurar-me a ferro, a fogo, a neve
É tão pouco por vós, que mais me pena
Ser esta vida cousa tão pequena.
Stanza 79, lines 5–8 (tr. Thomas Moore Musgrave)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto IV

Life