Quotes about morning
page 7

Thomas Buchanan Read photo

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

Thomas Buchanan Read (1822–1872) American artist

The new pastoral Book.

Emily Dickinson photo
James Cromwell photo
James Howard Kunstler photo
George W. Bush photo

“We drink our morning coffee with a drop of fear.”

John Twelve Hawks American writer

How We Live Now (2005)

Diane Ackerman photo

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

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

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

Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Jane Austen photo

“He seems a very harmless sort of young man, nothing to like or dislike in him — goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning, and plays at whist and makes queer faces in the evening.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1813-09-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

Everett Dean Martin photo
Ingmar Bergman photo
Jermain Defoe photo

“I've always been a religious person, and I try to think that every disappointment might just be a blessing in disguise. … I pray every day. In the mornings and, before I go to bed. I think it's important to pray not just when things are going bad.”

Jermain Defoe (1982) English association football player

"Prayer helped Defoe bounce back", interview with Football Focus (22 December 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/football_focus/6200993.stm.

Henry Adams photo

“…but he distinctly remembered standing at the house door one summer morning in a passionate outburst of rebellion against going to school. Naturally his mother was the immediate victim of his rage; that is what mothers are for, and boys also; but in this case the boy had his mother at unfair disadvantage, for she was a guest, and had no means of enforcing obedience. Henry showed a certain tactical ability by refusing to start, and he met all efforts at compulsion by successful, though too vehement protest. He was in fair way to win, and was holding his own, with sufficient energy, at the bottom of the long staircase which led up to the door of the President's library, when the door opened, and the old man slowly came down. Putting on his hat, he took the boy's hand without a word, and walked with him, paralyzed by awe, up the road to the town. After the first moments of consternation at this interference in a domestic dispute, the boy reflected that an old gentleman close on eighty would never trouble himself to walk near a mile on a hot summer morning over a shadeless road to take a boy to school, and that it would be strange if a lad imbued with the passion of freedom could not find a corner to dodge around, somewhere before reaching the school door. Then and always, the boy insisted that this reasoning justified his apparent submission; but the old man did not stop, and the boy saw all his strategical points turned, one after another, until he found himself seated inside the school, and obviously the centre of curious if not malevolent criticism. Not till then did the President release his hand and depart.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Marcus Aurelius photo

“In the morning, when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present; “I am rising to a man’s work.””

Meditations. v. 1.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Walter Scott photo

“But with the morning cool reflection came.”

Chronicles of the Canongate, Chap. iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Harry Chapin photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Robert Rauschenberg photo
Herbert Hoover photo

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Ben Gibbard photo
Joyce Carol Oates photo
Thomas Hood photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“And I say to you this morning in conclusion that I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in things. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in gadgets and contrivances. As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow, but to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Not in the little gods that can be with us in a few moments of prosperity, but in the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death, and causes us to fear no evil. That's the God. Not in the god that can give us a few Cadillac cars and Buick convertibles, as nice as they are, that are in style today and out of style three years from now, but the God who threw up the stars to bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity. Not in the god that can throw up a few skyscraping buildings, but the God who threw up the gigantic mountains, kissing the sky, as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blues. Not in the god that can give us a few televisions and radios, but the God who threw up that great cosmic light that gets up early in the morning in the eastern horizon, (who paints its technicolor across the blue—something that man could never make. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age, but the God who has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home. That's the God that I'm putting my ultimate faith in.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

John Constable photo
Steve McManaman photo

“That's a Sunday morning goal; it's certainly Sunday morning defending. Simple as you'd like, thank you very much! What a present!”

Steve McManaman (1972) English footballer

2010s, 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil v. Germany (2014)

Zoran Đinđić photo
Holly Johnson photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Oh, glory of the morning!
Oh, ye gifted, young, and brave!
What end have ye, but midnight;
What find ye but the grave?”

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

One Day
The Golden Violet (1827)

Salvador Dalí photo
Richard J. Daley photo

“I have conferred with the superintendent of police this morning and I gave him instructions that an order be issued by him immediately and under his signature to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand.”

Richard J. Daley (1902–1976) American politician

[David Farber, Chicago '68, University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 0226238016, pg 145(b)</small>, pg 249<small>(a)]
Stated one week following the April 1968 Chicago riots to the people of Chicago because of his dissatisfaction with the minimum use of force employed by Police Superintendent James B. Conlisk in dealing with rioters.

Warren Farrell photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Richard Harris Barham photo

“Next morning I was up betimes -- I sent the Crier round,
All with his bell and gold-laced hat to say I'd give a pound
To find that little vulgar Boy, who'd gone and used me so;
But when the Crier cried, 'O Yes!”

Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845) British writer and priest

the people cried, 'O No!'
Poem: Misadventures at Margate http://www.exclassics.com/ingold/inglegnd.txt

Van Morrison photo

“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.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William Ernest Henley photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Richard Henry Horne photo

“T is always morning somewhere in the world.”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

Orion (1843), Book iii, Canto ii. Compare: "'T is always morning somewhere", Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Wayside Inn. Birds of Killingworth, stanza 16.

Henry David Thoreau photo
Daniel Handler photo
John Byrom photo

“Christians, awake! salute the happy morn,
Whereon the Saviour of mankind was born.”

John Byrom (1692–1763) Poet, inventor of a shorthand system

A Hymn for Christmas Day (1750)

John Mayer photo
John Updike photo
Ben Harper photo

“The world awakens on the run
And will soon be earning
With hopes of better days to come
It's a morning yearning.”

Ben Harper (1969) singer-songwriter and musician

Morning Yearning.
Song lyrics, Both Sides of the Gun (2006)

Paul Keating photo
Thomas Wolfe photo
Edward Coote Pinkney photo

“Her every tone is music's own,
Like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody
Dwells ever in her words.”

Edward Coote Pinkney (1802–1828) American poet, lawyer, sailor, professor, and editor

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

Julian of Norwich photo
Garth Nix photo
Wilkie Collins photo

“I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.”

Armadale - Vol. II [Collier, 1886] ( p. 130 https://books.google.com/books?id=v7sBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA130)
Also in Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot by Carolyn Oulton [Springer, 2002, ISBN 0-230-50464-7] ( p. 136 https://books.google.com/books?id=abuADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA136)

Van Morrison photo
Elton Mayo photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo

“When I am writing I instinctively make a little drawing now and then like the one I sent you lately, and for instance, this morning, 'Elijah in the Desert.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Amsterdam 12 June, 1877; 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, p. 29 (letter 101)
while studying in Amsterdam at the theological school, to become clergyman
1870s

Stephen Fry photo

“Weak watery sun, but sun nonetheless. Why does it take me nearly 2 hours just to get through the morning emails? Pah, poo and pants.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

2000s

Arlo Guthrie photo
Juhani Aho photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro photo

“This morning I will not
Comb my hair.
It has lain
Pillowed on the hand of my lover.”

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (662–710) Japanese poet

XX, p. 22
Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955)

Julian of Norwich photo
Mitt Romney photo
Richard Rodríguez photo

“Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this...? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

John Gardiner Calkins Brainard photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“Remember Marxism? It used to be a sour sort of fun to tease Marxists about the contradictions in some of their pet ideas. The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.Today we have a similar phenomenon brewing on the religious right: the inevitability of the End Days, or the Rapture, the coming Armageddon that will separate the blessed from the damned in the final day of Judgment. Cults and prophets proclaiming the imminent end of the world have been with us for several millennia, and it has been another sour sort of fun to ridicule them the morning after, when they discover that their calculations were a little off. But, just as with the Marxists, there are some among them who are working hard to "hasten the inevitable," not merely anticipating the End Days with joy in their hearts, but taking political action to bring about the conditions they think are the prerequisites for that occasion. And these people are not funny at all. They are dangerous, for the same reason that red-diaper babies are dangerous: they put their allegiance to their creed ahead of their commitment to democracy, to peace, to (earthly) justice — and to truth. If push comes to shove, some of the are prepared to lie and even to kill…”

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Keith Richards photo

“This morning on Dartford station a guy I knew at primary school came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry made. He is called Mick Jagger.”

Keith Richards (1943) British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones

From letter to Keith's aunt Keef comes clean, The Times p4, 15 Oct 2010.

Francis Escudero photo
Roger Bacon photo

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Nick Drake photo

“And what will happen in the morning when the world it gets
So crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning?”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

Hazey Jane II
Song lyrics, Bryter Later (1970)

Robert Frost photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Aaro Hellaakoski photo

“When the early morning sun
first pierced the grayness in the sky,
a pickerel rose from his watery home
to climb a pine tree, singing.
And high in the branches, he looked upon
the morning's glowing beauty -
the wind-blown ripples on the lake,
dew-freshened flowers and fields below.”

Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952) Finnish writer, poet, geographer and teacher

Aaro Hellaakoski. "The song of the pike hauen laulu." Aina Swan Cutler (trans.) in: Aili Jarvenpa, ‎Michael G. Karni (1989), Sampo, the magic mill: a collection of Finnish-American writing.

Victor Villaseñor photo
John Marston photo
John Greenleaf Whittier photo

“The harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;
The song the stars of morning sung
Has never died away.”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

The Worship of Nature, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Mia Couto photo
Ogden Nash photo
Margaret Thatcher photo
Cat Stevens photo
Ryan Adams photo

“And the pain in the morning comes as easy as it goes”

Ryan Adams (1974) American alt-country/rock singer-songwriter

A Kiss Before I Go
29 (2005)

Fetty Wap photo
Gustave Courbet photo

“It is not often that one encounters so complete an expression of poverty and so, right then and there I got the idea for a painting. I told them to come to my studio the next morning.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

Quote, 1850's explaining to Champfleury and the writer Francis Wey; as cited on Wikipedia; Masanès, Fabrice 2006, p. 31
Courbet explains in his quote the start of his painting 'Stone-Breakers' [painted in 1849-50 / destroyed in the Allied Bombing of Dresden in 1945]; this painting was inspired by a scene Courbet witnessed on the roadside.
1840s - 1850s

Phil Brooks photo

“I really hope that the symbolism isn't lost on you four Superstars in the chamber right now, because it's killing me. Here's four extremely weak individuals that, every day, are locked inside a prison of addiction, like most of these people here today; and now, the four of you are locked inside the Elimination Chamber with me. And be sure, it's not me locked in here with you — it's you locked in here with me. And tomorrow morning, when you're nursing the pain and the wounds that this chamber and myself have caused you, I want you to remember that when your pod door opens and you came out and I defeated you, don't think of it as failure. Think of it as me saving you. [Standing over Rey Mysterio's pod] Think of it as me setting you free.
Punk: [To Undertaker, after elimination R-Truth] You'd better pray that your pod door opens last, 'cause when you come out, I'm gonna make you tap out, just like I did before. [To John Morrison] And I'm gonna prove to you that your decadent rock life will get you nowhere. I'm gonna prove to the world that straight-edge means I'm better than you! For those of you at home, feel free, place your hand on the screen and feel CM Punk flow through you!
Lawler: Matt, did you just put your hand on the screen?
Striker: Yes.
Lawler: Do you feel CM Punk flow through you?
Punk: Nobody can stop me!
Cole: Guys, the sermon's over in [checking the timer] three seconds.”

Phil Brooks (1978) American professional wrestler and mixed martial artist

Elimination Chamber - February 21, 2010
Friday Night SmackDown

Nathanael Greene photo
Ibn Battuta photo
André Maurois photo

“All the people who are hating me right now and are here waiting to see me die, when you wake up in the morning you aren't going to feel any different. You are going to hate me as much tomorrow as you do tonight.
Reach out to God and he will hear you. Let him touch your hearts. Don't hate all your lives.”

Sean Sellers (1969–1999) American murderer

Final statement before his execution (5 February 1999), quoted in "Man Who Killed 3 as Teen Is Among Pair Executed" in Los Angeles Times (5 February 1999) http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/05/news/mn-5135.

Margaret Cho photo
Ursula K. Le Guin photo
Josefa Iloilo photo
Ruan Ji photo
Luís de Camões photo
Yehudi Menuhin photo