Quotes about lake
page 2

Ray Bradbury photo
Nguyễn Du photo

“West Lake flower garden: a desert, now.
Alone, at the window, I read through old pages.
A smudge of rouge, a scent of perfume, but
I still weep.
Is there a Fate for books?
Why mourn for a half-burned poem?
There is nothing, there is no one to question,
and yet this misery feels like my own.
Ah, in another three hundred years
will anyone weep, remembering my fate?”

Nguyễn Du (1765–1820) Vietnamese poet

"Reading Hsiao-ch'ing", in The Harpercollins World Reader: The Modern World, eds. Mary Ann Caws and Christopher Prendergast (HarperCollins Publishers, 1994), ISBN 978-0065013832, p. 1411
Hsiao-Ching was "a seventeenth-century poet who was forced to become a concubine to a man whose jealous primary wife burned almost all of her poems" — David Damrosch, "Global Scripts and the Formation of Literary Traditions", in Approaches to World Literature (2013), p. 98

Paula Poundstone photo

“They're not going to teach science at all. What they do is take the science students down to the lake, tie them in burlap sacks and throw them in. If God thinks they're good science students, they float.”

Paula Poundstone (1959) American comedian

About science education in the state of Kansas; quoted in [Randi, James, James Randi, November 11, 2006, http://www.randi.org/jr/2006-11/111706rampa.html#i7, "A Sure Test", Swift, James Randi Educational Foundation, 2006-11-18]

Vincent Van Gogh photo

“Of all the colors I ordered: the three chromes, the Prussian blue, the emerald, the crimson lakes, the malachite green, all the orange lead, hardly one of them is to be found on the Dutch palette, in Maris, in Mauve or Israels - [all contemporaries of Vincent, Dutch painters of the Hague School. ]”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, Spring 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 476), p 31
1880s, 1888

Kent Hovind photo
Chief Seattle photo
Tracey Ullman photo
Thomas Love Peacock photo
George Eliot photo
Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
John Muir photo

“One shining morning, at the head of the Pacheco Pass, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most divinely beautiful and sublime I have ever beheld. There at my feet lay the great central plain of California, level as a lake thirty or forty miles wide, four hundred long, one rich furred bed of golden Compositae. And along the eastern shore of this lake of gold rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, in massive, tranquil grandeur, so gloriously colored and so radiant that it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city. Along the top, and extending a good way down, was a rich pearl-gray belt of snow; then a belt of blue and dark purple, marking the extension of the forests; and stretching along the base of the range a broad belt of rose-purple, where lay the miners' gold and the open foothill gardens — all the colors smoothly blending, making a wall of light clear as crystal and ineffably fine, yet firm as adamant. Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years in the midst of it, rejoicing and wondering, seeing the glorious floods of light that fill it, — the sunbursts of morning among the mountain-peaks, the broad noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, — it still seems to me a range of light.”

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

" The Treasures of the Yosemite http://books.google.com/books?id=ZzWgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA483", The Century Magazine, volume XL, number 4 (August 1890) pages 483-500 (at page 483)
1890s

Werner Herzog photo
William Saroyan photo
Ludovico Ariosto photo

“As on the crystal surface of a lake
The trembling shafts of sunlight mirrored are,
Leaping to roof-top, and, at random glancing,
Sparkle and gleam, in all directions dancing.”

Qual d'acqua chiara il tremolante lume,
Dal sol percossa o da' notturni rai,
Per gli ampli tetti va con lungo salto
A destra et a sinistra, e basso et alto.
Canto VIII, stanza 71 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Thomas Hood photo

“There's a double beauty whenever a swan
Swims on a lake with her double thereon.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Her Honeymoon; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

Jim Butcher photo

“Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."”

The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002)

“Man is a complex being who makes deserts bloom and lakes die.”

Gladys Bronwyn Stern (1890–1973) British writer

Quoted in Women Know Everything!: 3,241 Quips, Quotes, and Brilliant Remarks By Karen Weekes, p. 305

Cecil Taylor photo

“I don't expect people who listen to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer to come hear me. I accept that reality.”

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018) American pianist and poet

Source: http://www.bluesforpeace.com/names.htm

James Matthews Legaré photo

“Thou in thy lake dost see
Thyself: so she
Beholds her image in her eyes
Reflected. Thus did Venus rise
From out the sea.”

James Matthews Legaré (1823–1859) American writer

To a Lily, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

John Clare photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo
Honoré de Balzac photo

“Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness of a lake. There is no character in women’s faces before the age of thirty.”

Rien n'est-il si discret qu'un jeune visage, parce que rien n'est plus immobile. La figure d'une jeune femme a le calme, le poli, la fraîcheur de la surface d'un lac. La physionomie des femmes ne commence qu'à trente ans.
Source: A Woman of Thirty (1842), Ch. VI: The Old Age of a Guilty Mother

Thomas Gray photo

“Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers, that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 1
On the Death of a Favourite Cat http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?textodfc (1747)

John Keats photo
Bill Mollison photo
Gene Kelly photo
Koichi Tohei photo
Robert T. Bakker photo
Kent Hovind photo
Richard Fuller (minister) photo

“Even as the light that shifts and plays upon a lake, when Cynthia looks forth from heaven or the bright wheel of Phoebus in mid course passes by, so doth he shed a gleam upon the waters; he heeds not the shadow of the Nymph or her hair or the sound of her as she rises to embrace him. Greedily casting her arms about him, as he calls, alack! too late for help and utters the name of his mighty friend, she draws him down; for her strength is aided by his falling weight.”
Stagna vaga sic luce micant ubi Cynthia caelo prospicit aut medii transit rota candida Phoebi, tale iubar diffundit aquis: nil umbra comaeque turbavitque sonus surgentis ad oscula nymphae. illa avidas iniecta manus heu sera cientem auxilia et magni referentem nomen amici detrahit, adiutae prono nam pondere vires.

Source: Argonautica, Book III, Lines 558–564

Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
George Pope Morris photo

“The union of lakes, the union of lands,
The union of States none can sever,
The union of hearts, the union of hands,
And the flag of our Union forever!”

George Pope Morris (1802–1864) American publisher

The Flag of our Union, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Louisa May Alcott photo
Charles Lyell photo
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo
Edwin Arnold photo
Megan Mullally photo
Jacques Herzog photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Gildas photo

“[Description of Britain] Its plains are spacious, its hills are pleasantly situated, adapted for superior tillage, and its mountains are admirably calculated for the alternate pasturage of cattle, where flowers of various colours, trodden by the feet of man, give it the appearance of a lovely picture. It is decked, like a man's chosen bride, with divers jewels, with lucid fountains and abundant brooks wandering over the snow white sands; with transparent rivers, flowing in gentle murmurs, and offering a sweet pledge of slumber to those who recline upon their banks, whilst it is irrigated by abundant lakes, which pour forth cool torrents of refreshing water.”
[Descriptio Britanniae] Campis late pansis collibusque amoeno situ locatis, praepollenti culturae aptis, montibus alternandis animalium pastibus maxime covenientibus, quorum diversorum colorum flores humanis gressibus pulsati non indecentem ceu picturam eisdem imprimebant, electa veluti sponsa monilibus diversis ornata, fontibus lucidis crebris undis niveas veluti glareas pellentibus, pernitidisque rivis leni murmure serpentibus ipsorumque in ripis accubantibus suavis soporis pignus praetendentibus, et lacubus frigidum aquae torrentem vivae exundantibus irrigua.

Section 3.
De Excidio Britanniae (On the Ruin of Britain)

Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Barbara (singer) photo

“One fine day, or perhaps one night,
Near a lake, when I'm sleeping,
Suddenly, the skies cave in,
And out of nowhere,
Surges an eagle, black.”

Barbara (singer) (1930–1997) French singer

Un beau jour, ou peut-etre une nuit,
Près d'un lac, je m'étais endormie,
Quand soudain, semblant crever le ciel,
Et venant de nulle part,
Surgit un aigle noir.
L'Aigle noir.
Song lyrics

Tecumseh photo

“The Muscogee was once a mighty people. The Georgians trembled at your war-whoop, and the maidens of my tribe, on the distant lakes, sung the prowess of your warriors and sighed for their embraces. Now your very blood is white; your tomahawks have no edge; your bows and arrows were buried with your fathers. Oh! Muscogees, brethren of my mother, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery; once more strike for vengeance; once more for your country. The spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the weeping skies. Let the white race perish! They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on your dead! Back! whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back! back — ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings! Destroy their stock! Slay their wives and children! The red man owns the country, and the pale-face must never enjoy it! War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig their very corpses from the graves! Our country must give no rest to the white man's bones.”

Tecumseh (1768–1813) Native American leader of the Shawnee

Speech to the Creek people, quoted in Great Speeches by Native Americans by Robert Blaisdel. This quote appeared in J. F H. Claiborne, Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan (Harper, New York, 1860). However, historian John Sugden writes, "Claiborne's description of Tecumseh at Tuckabatchie in the alleged autobiography of the Fontiersman, Samuel Dale, however, is fraudulent. … Although they adopt the style of the first person, as in conventional autobiography, the passages dealing with Tecumseh were largely based upon published sources, including McKenney, Pickett and Drake's Life of Tecumseh. The story is cast in the exaggerated and sensational language of the dime novelist, with embellishments more likely supplied by Claiborne than Dale, and the speech put into Tecumseh's mouth is not only unhistorical (it has the British in Detroit!) but similar to ones the author concocted for other Indians in different circumstances." Sugden also finds it "unreliable" and "bogus." Sugden, John. "Early Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh’s Tour of the Indian Country, 1811-1812." American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1986): 273–304. doi:10.2307/1183838.
Misattributed, "Let the White Race Perish" (October 1811)

Halldór Laxness photo
Aldous Huxley photo

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Interview, Time magazine, December 1957

Dorothy Parker photo
Mitt Romney photo
Eminem photo

“Better try to stay wide awake, or you might end up found dead by the lake.”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Stay Wide Awake".
2000s, Relapse (2009)

Miguel de Unamuno photo
Jack Vance photo
Octave Mirbeau photo
Van Morrison photo

“Fair play to you,
Kilarney's lakes are so blue,
And the architecture I'm taking in with my mind,
So fine.”

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

Fair Play
Song lyrics, Veedon Fleece (1974)

Gerald Durrell photo
Amitabh Bachchan photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Fred Astaire photo

“That which we look on with unselfish love
And true humility is surely ours,
Even as a lake looks at the stars above
And makes within itself a heaven of stars.”

Mary Gardiner Brainard (1837–1905) American poet

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

Amit Chaudhuri photo
Sylvia Plath photo
Hilary of Poitiers photo
Aleksis Kivi photo
Gideon Mantell photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Richard Matheson photo
Leonard Cohen photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Let beeves and home-bred kine partake
The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;
The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow!”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

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

Gary Snyder photo
Paul Klee photo

“The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

IIII.37, The Arrow. p. 54
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

Sören Kierkegaard photo

“After a considerable walk through the forest, where I became acquainted with several of the little lakes I am so fond of, I came to Hestehaven and Lake Carl. Here is one of the most beautiful regions I have ever seen. The countryside is somewhat isolated and slopes steeply down to the lake, but with the beech forests growing on either side, it is not barren. A growth of rushes forms the background and the lake itself the foreground; a fairly large part of the lake is clear, but a still larger part is overgrown with the large green leaves of the waterlily, under which the fish seemingly try to hide but now and then peek out and flounder about on the surface in order to bathe in sunshine. The land rises on the opposite side, a great beech forest, and in the morning light the lighted areas make a marvelous contrast to the shadowed areas. The church bells call to prayer, but not in a temple made by human hands. If the birds do not need to be reminded to praise God, then ought men not be moved to prayer outside of the church, in the true house of God, where heaven's arch forms the ceiling of the church, where the roar of the storm and the light breezes take the place of the organ's bass and treble, where the singing of the birds make up the congregational hymns of praise, where echo does not repeat the pastor's voice as in the arch of the stone church, but where everything resolves itself in an endless antiphony — Hillerød, July 25, 1835”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1830s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1830s

Craig Ferguson photo

“Just a warning: If you're a bunch of sexy teenagers at a lake where other sexy teenagers were killed 30 years ago, leave! The guy in the forest with a hockey mask… maybe doesn't play hockey.”

Craig Ferguson (1962) Scottish-born American television host, stand-up comedian, writer, actor, director, author, producer and voice a…

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson (2005–2014)

Hermann Göring photo
John Muir photo

“With inexpressible delight you wade out into the grassy sun-lake, feeling yourself contained in one of Nature's most sacred chambers, withdrawn from the sterner influences of the mountains, secure from all intrusion, secure from yourself, free in the universal beauty. And notwithstanding the scene is so impressively spiritual, and you seem dissolved in it, yet everything about you is beating with warm, terrestrial, human love, delightfully substantial and familiar.”

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

" The Glacier Meadows of the Sierra http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA478", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 4 (February 1879) pages 478-483 (at page 479); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 7: The Glacier Meadows
1890s, The Mountains of California (1894)

James Fenimore Cooper photo
John Milton photo
Ian McDonald photo
Eugene Field photo
Alexej von Jawlensky photo

“We had a very lovely place [in Ascona with his life-companion Marianne Werefkin ] with a garden directly on the lake. It was on the edge of Ascona. Next to it began the Campagna [landscape], and this Campagna was enchantingly beautiful, like a dream.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

quote from Jawlensky's memoirs, 1936/41: Lebenserinnerungen (Memories) p. 119; as cited in Exile, the Avant-Garde, and Dada: Women Artists Active in Switzerland during the First World War http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h0q1.10, by Isabel Wünsche, p. 66
Jawlensky was very pleased with this move from Zurich to Ascona; Werefkin arranged this family's move after Jawlensky fell gravely ill with the Spanish flu. A few years later Jawlensky would leave here.
1936 - 1941

David Quammen photo
Carlos Drummond de Andrade photo

“I never saw the sea.
I don't know if it's pretty,
I don't know if it's rough.
The sea doesn't matter to me.I saw the lake.
Yes, the lake.
The lake is large and also calm.The rain of colors
from the exploding afternoon
makes the lake shimmer
makes it a lake painted
by every color.
I never saw the sea.
I saw the lake ...”

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987) Brazilian poet

<p>Eu não vi o mar.
Não sei se o mar é bonito.
Não sei se ele é bravo.
O mar não me importa.</p><p>Eu vi a lagoa.
A lagoa, sim.
A lagoa é grande
e calma também.</p><p>Na chuva de cores
da tarde que explode,
a lagoa brilha.
A lagoa se pinta
de todas as cores.
Eu não vi o mar.
Eu vi a lagoa...</p>

"Lagoa" ["Lake"]
Alguma Poesia [Some Poetry] (1930)

Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Arnold Schwarzenegger photo
Kalle Päätalo photo
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury photo

“Earth and Sky, Woods and Fields, Lakes and Rivers, the Mountain and the Sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.”

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834–1913) British banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath

The Use of Life (1894), ch. IV: Recreation

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
John Muir photo
Robert Southey photo

“From its fountains
In the mountains,
Its rills and its gills;
Through moss and through brake,
It runs and it creeps
For a while, till it sleeps
In its own little lake.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 2.
The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

James Macpherson photo

“Then rose the strife of kings about the hill of night; but it was soft as two summer gales, shaking their light wings on a lake.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Cathlin of Clutha"
The Poems of Ossian

Mos Def photo

“Flow greatest like the greatest lakes / Capes on great estates, quiet water major waves”

Mos Def (1973) American rapper and actor

From "Priority"
Album The Ecstatic

Peter Atkins photo
Margaret Sanger photo
Peter Greenaway photo

“It's like Shelley. Like Werther. Like a Japanese Ophelia. Like a beautiful Oriental Lady in the Lake.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Philip reacts to Mio's death
8 1/2 Women

Bertolt Brecht photo

“High above the lake a bomber flies.
From the rowing boats
Children look up, women, an old man. From a distance
They appear like young starlings, their beaks
Wide open for food.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"This Summer's Sky" [Der Himmel dieses Sommers], (1953), trans. Michael Hamburger in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 444
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)