Quotes about lark (58 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Like the lark that soars in the air, first singing, then silent, content with the last sweetness that satiates it, such seemed to me that image, the imprint of the Eternal Pleasure.”

Dante Alighieri book Paradiso

Canto XX, lines 73–77 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso

Pleasure , Singing

“The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Part I, line 221.
Source: Pippa Passes (1841)

God , World , Spring

“Sandry: "There has to be something we can do."
Lark: "We're mages. We do what we can, but some problems are too big to fix."
Sandry: "Then I wish I weren't a mage. What good is magic, if you can't use it to help people.”

Tamora Pierce book Daja's Book

Source: Daja's Book

People , Problem , Help

“Daja: "He and Rosethorn work together? They hate each other."
Lark: "I didn't say they liked it.
- Daja and Lark referring to Rosethorn and Crane's cooperation on finding the cures for new diseases”

Tamora Pierce Briar's Book

Source: Briar's Book

Hate , Disease

“When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark:
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

“There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"”

Edward Lear (1812–1888) British artist, illustrator, author and poet

Book of Nonsense http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/nnsns10.txt, Limerick 1 (1846).

Fear

“My curiosity sister of larks.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 219
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A minha curiosidade irmã das cotovias

Sister

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

Shirley Jackson book The Haunting of Hill House

Source: The Haunting of Hill House

Dreams , Reality

“To a Young Poet

Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together
Go down, one feather.

No thing that ever flew,
Not the lark, not you,
Can die as others do.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Collected Poems

Bird , Time

“If the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks.”

Francois Rabelais (1494–1553) major French Renaissance writer

Hope

“The owl goes not into the nest of the lark.”

Victor Hugo book The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Source: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“Through the gloomy clouds break / Blue sky, sunshine, / On the heights and in the valley / Sing the lark and the nightingale
God, I thank you that I live / Not forever in this world / Strengthen me that my soul rise / Upward toward your firmament.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

some poetry lines of Friedrich, c. 1802-05; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich Bekenntnisse, p 57; as quoted & translated by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 48
1794 - 1840

God , World , Soul , Singing

“Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go?
Fresh as a lark mounting at break of day,
Festively she puts forth in trim array.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Where Lies the Land, l. 1 (1806).

“There was a jolly miller once,
Lived on the river Dee;
He worked and sung from morn till night:
No lark more blithe than he.”

Isaac Bickerstaffe (1733–1812) Irish playwright and librettist

Love in a Village (1762), Act i, scene 2.

Night

“As in hunting, so in hawking, the sportsmen had their peculiar impressions, and therefore the tyro in the art of falconry is recommended to learn the following arrangement of terms as they were to be applied to the different kinds of birds assembled in companies. A sege of herons, and of bitterns; an herd of swans, of cranes, and of curlews; a dopping of sheldrakes; a spring of teels; a covert of cootes; a gaggle of geese; a badelynge of ducks; a sord or sute of mallards; a muster of peacoccks; a nye of pheasants; a bevy of quails; a covey of partridges; a congregation of plovers; a flight of doves; a dule of turtles; a walk of snipes; a fall of woodcocks; a brood of hens; a building of rooks; a murmuration of starlings; an exaltation of larks; a flight of swallows; a host of sparrows; a watch of nightingales; and a charm of goldfinches.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 37
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Collective nouns

Art , Spring , Bird , Learning

“That bullying this is the biggest lark out there.”

Stacey Campfield (1968) US politician

“He [ Delacroix ] is an eagle, I am only a lark.”

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

as quoted in Corot, Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède - Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (France), National Gallery of Canada, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1996, p. 272 – quote 65
1860s

“Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833, "There!" said a Stripling, l. 10 (1833).

Love , Flowers , Nature , Happiness

“Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

The Woods of Westermain http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-woods-of-westermain/, st. 1 (1883).

Peace , Heart

“How sweet and beautifull is every place & I visit my old Haunts with renewed delight… nothing can exceed the beautiful green of the meadows which are beginning to fill with butter Cups — & various flowers — the birds are singing from morning till night but most of all the Sky larks — How delightfull is the Country.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to his wife, Maria Bicknell (20 April 1821); as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 28
1820s

Beauty , Flowers , Bird , Singing

“What humiliation, what disgrace for us all, that it should be necessary for one man to exhort other men not to be inhuman and irrational towards their fellow-creatures! Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them — have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience — so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! Is there no soul manifest in the eyes of the living or dying animal — no expression of suffering in the eye of a deer or stag hunted to death — nothing which accuses them of murder before the avenging Eternal Justice? …. Are the souls of all other animals but man mortal, or are they essential in their organisation? Does the world-idea (Welt-Idee) pertain to them also — the soul of nature — a particle of the Divine Spirit? I know not; but I feel, and every reasonable man feels like me, it is in miserable, intolerable contradiction with our human nature, with our conscience, with our reason, with all our talk of humanity, destiny, nobility; it is in frightful (himmelschreinder) contradiction with our poetry and philosophy, with our nature and with our (pretended) love of nature, with our religion, with our teachings about benevolent design — that we bring into existence merely to kill, to maintain our own life by the destruction of other life. …. It is a frightful wrong that other species are tortured, worried, flayed, and devoured by us, in spite of the fact that we are not obliged to this by necessity; while in sinning against the defenceless and helpless, just claimants as they are upon our reasonable conscience and upon our compassion, we succeed only in brutalising ourselves. This, besides, is quite certain, that man has no real pity and compassion for his own species, so long as he is pitiless towards other races of beings.”

Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870) German humorist and satirist

Das Menschendasein in seinen weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen (1850); as quoted in The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-eating https://archive.org/stream/ethicsofdietcate00will/ethicsofdietcate00will#page/n3/mode/2up by Howard Williams (London: F. Pitman, 1883), pp. 287-286.

Love , Life , Death , Men

“Goe to bed with the Lambe, and rise with the Larke.”

John Lyly (1554–1606) English politician

Source: Euphues and his England, P. 229. Compare: "To rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb", Breton, Court and Country, 1618 (reprint, page 182); "Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed", James Hurdis, The Village Curate.

“Hark, hark! the lark
On windswept bark
Freezes against a sky of lead!
Now see him stop,
Take one small hop,
And suddenly keel over dead!”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

The Lark

Dead

“I walk where once the grass was green
And mourn the lark that sings no more
What bird could sing whose eyes have seen
Broken blossoms on the field of war?”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song Broken Blossoms.

War , Bird , Grass , Singing

“Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain.”

Fawn M. Brodie (1915–1981) American historian and biographer

Los Angeles Times Home Magazine (Feb. 20, 1977)

Mountain , Cooking

“To what may youth's first joyance be compared?
To daylight, and the glad song of the lark
Bursting together, — to a sudden gush
Of perfume, till the giddy senses link
With overmuch delight,— a dream,— a tale
Of Paradise, told in fair poesy.”

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

(13th December 1823) Poetic Sketches. Fourth Series. Sketch V.— The Island.
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Youth , Dreams , Sense

“The lark is with triumphant song
Singing the rose-touched clouds among:
'Tis there that lighted song has birth,
What hath such hymn to do with earth?”

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

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Birth , Light , Singing

“Pack, clouds, away! and welcome, day!
With night we banish sorrow.
Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft
To give my Love good-morrow!
Wings from the wind to please her mind,
Notes from the lark I'll borrow:
Bird, prune thy wing! nightingale, sing!”

Thomas Heywood (1574–1641) English playwright, actor, and author

Poem Matin Song http://www.bartleby.com/101/205.html

Love , Bird , Singing , Night

“I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy—but I had none of it. I always saw the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity.”

John Buchan book The Path of the King

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. VIII "The Hidden City"

Life , Pleasure

“It's gonna be so good now
It's gonna be so good
Can you see the lark ascending?”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

“The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar;
He was a humorist of note and keen at repartee,
He laid the odds and kept a "tote", whatever that may be,
And when he saw our friend arrive, he whispered, "Here's a lark!
Just watch me catch him all alive, this man from Ironbark."”

Andrew Paterson (1877–1948) Scottish photographer

The Man From Ironbark.

“Triumphant hours are the Lark's
Who circles skywards from his home each day:
World's early riser, with bubbling golden song,
Towards the firmament, guardian of April's gate.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Oriau hydr yr ehedydd
A dry fry o'i dŷ bob dydd,
Borewr byd, berw aur bill,
Barth â'r wybr, borthor Ebrill.
"Yr Ehedydd" (The Skylark), line 1; translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym (ed. and trans. Rachel Bromwich) A Selection of Poems (Harmondsworth, Penguin, [1982] 1985) p. 74.

World , Home

“That muche is my bowe bent to shoote at these marks,
And kyll feare, when the sky falth we shall haue larks.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

That much is my bow bent to shoot at these marks,
And kill fear, when the sky falls we shall have larks.
Part I, chapter 4.
Proverbs (1546)

Fear

“Wednesday
Yep, same again. Saw a few nice whirling colours and things. That's it. Easy, this journal lark, isn't it?”

Jonathan Stroud (1970) British writer of fantasy fiction

The Bartimaeus Trilogy Official Website, Bart's Journal

“In a valley sweet with singing
From the hill and from the wood,
Where the green moss rills were springing,
A wondrous maiden stood.
The first lark seemed to carry
Her coming through the air;
Not long she wont to tarry,
Though she wandered none knew where.”

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

The London Literary Gazette (10th January 1835) Versions from the German (Second Series.) 'The Coming of Spring'—Schiller.
Translations, From the German

Spring , Singing

“As well as the greatest optimist I see the lark soaring in the spring air, but I also see a young girl of about twenty, who might have been in good health, a victim to consumption, and who will perhaps drown herself before she dies of an illness. If one is always in respectable company among rather well-to-do bourgeois one does not notice this so much perhaps, but if one has dined for years on 'la vache enragee', as I did, one cannot deny that great misery is a fact that weighs down the scale.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Antwerp Belgium, Winter 1886; 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 453), p. 38
1880s, 1886

Health , Girl , Spring

“[From Reginald Clinton]: I do not believe that the heart is turned from the Creator by enjoying his works. Of what avail is the sweet breath of the rose, the morning song of the lark? The pleasure they impart is not matter of necessity, and yet we delight in both. The soul of the poet is as much His gift as the fragrance of the flower, or the lay of the bird; and the page where inspired words record heroic deed, touching sorrow, or natural loveliness, is one of those pleasures for which we should be thankful. I, for my part, believe most devoutly in the Almighty mercy, when I see how much that is beautiful and gladdening has been scattered over our pilgrimage here.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Pleasure , Beauty , Soul , Flowers

“Crowds of bees are giddy with clover
Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,
Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,
Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.”

Jean Ingelow (1820–1897) British writer

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

Life , Bee

“"Leicester," she cried, "is this thy love
That thou so oft hast sworn to me,
To leave me in this lonely grove,
Immured in shameful privity?"No more thou com'st with lover's speed,
Thy once beloved bride to see;
But be she alive, or be she dead,
I fear, stern Earl, 's the same to thee."Not so the usage I received
When happy in my father's hall;
No faithless husband then me grieved,
No chilling fears did me appall."I rose up with the cheerful morn,
No lark more blithe, no flower more gay;
And like the bird that haunts the thorn,
So merrily sung the livelong day."If that my beauty is but small,
Among court ladies all despised,
Why didst thou rend it from that hall,
Where, scornful Earl, it well was prized?"”

William Julius Mickle Cumnor Hall

Stanzas 3–7
Cumnor Hall (1784)

Love , Fear , Beauty , Flowers

“Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed.”

James Hurdis (1763–1801) British academic

The Village Curate. Compare: "To rise with the lark, and go to bed with the lamb", Nicholas Breton, Court and Country (reprint, 1618), p. 183; "Goe to bed with the Lambe, and rise with the Larke", John Lyly, Euphues and his England, p. 229.

“Many a head that down had lain,
Impatient with its twelve hours' pain,
And wishing that the bed it prest,
Were, as the grave's, a long last rest,
Has sprung again at morning's call,
Forgiving, or forgetting all;
Lighting the weary weight of thought
With colours from the day-break brought,
Reading new promise in the sky,
And hearing Hope, the lark on high.”

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

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Pain , Hope , Forgiveness , Light

“And they tried to rag me in the smoking room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn – I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the grass looked as if it had been left out all night.”

Saki (1870–1916) British writer

"Reginald on House-Parties"
Reginald (1904)

Bird , Thinking , Grass , Night

“By robbing Peter he paid Paul, … and hoped to catch larks if ever the heavens should fall.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Gargantua (1534), Chapter 11.

Hope

“Criticism, like so many other things, keeps to what has been said before and does not get out of the rut. This business of the 'Beautiful' some see it in curved lines, some in straight lines, but all persist in seeing it as a matter of line. I am now looking out of my window and I can see the most lovely countryside; lines just do not come into my head: the lark is singing, the river sparkles with a thousand diamonds, the leaves are whispering; where, I should like to know, are the lines that produce delicious impressions like these? They refuse to see proportion or harmony except between two lines: all else they regard as chaos, and the dividers alone are judge.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote from a letter to Léon Peisse, 15 July 1949; as cited in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68
this quote refers to Delacroix's refusal to use the line as boundary of the form in his painting art, as a too sharp dividing force in the picture - in contrast to the famous classical painter in Paris then, Ingres
1831 - 1863

Love , Beauty , Business , Singing