Quotes about noon
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Denise Levertov photo
Charles Boarman photo

“Navy Department, Washington, Sept. 16, 1879.
General Order: The Acting Secretary of the Navy announces, with regret, to the Navy and Marine Corps, the death of Rear-Admiral Charles Boarman, on the 13th instant, at his home in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, and after an honorable service of over sixty-eight years. Rear-Admiral Boarman entered the Navy, June 9, 1811, and at the time of his death had been longer in the service than any other Officer borne on the Navy Register. He was a participant in the War of 1812, and during his long career in the Navy had many important commands. On March 4, 1879, he was promoted from a Commodore to a Rear-Admiral on the retired list, from August 15, 1876, under the law authorizing such promotion, where an officer, being at the outbreak of the Rebellion, a citizen of a State engaged in such rebellion, exhibited marked fidelity to the Union in adhering to the flag of the United States. In respect to his memory it is hereby ordered, that, on the day after the receipt hereof, the flags of the Navy Yards and Stations, and vessels in commission, be displayed at half mast, from sunrise to sunset, and thirteen minute guns be fired at noon from the Navy Yards and Stations, flagships, and vessels acting singly.”

Charles Boarman (1795–1879) US Navy Rear Admiral

William N. Jeffers, Acting Secretary of the Navy 1879
Historical Records and Studies, Vol. VI (1911)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
James Beattie photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Lin Yutang photo
John Dear photo
Owen Lovejoy photo

“Is it desired to call attention to this fact? Proclaim it upon the house-tops! Write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest! Make it blaze from the sun at high noon and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, three-quarters of a mile east of the village, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of my God.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA178 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 178
Also quoted in The History of Abraham Lincoln, and the Overthrow of Slavery http://books.google.com/books?id=RW0FAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA225, by Isaac Newton Arnold
Also quoted as Yes, I do assist fugitive slaves to escape! Proclaim it upon the house-tops; write it upon every leaf that trembles in the forest; make it blaze from the sun at high noon, and shine forth in the radiance of every star that bedecks the firmament of God. Let it echo through all the arches of heaven, and reverberate and bellow through all the deep gorges of hell, where slave catchers will be very likely to hear it. Owen Lovejoy lives at Princeton, Illinois, and he aids every fugitive that comes to his door and asks it. Thou invisible demon of slavery! Dost thou think to cross my humble threshold, and forbid me to give bread to the hungry and shelter to the houseless? I bid you defiance in the name of God.
1850s, The Fanaticism of the Democratic Party (February 1859)

Claude McKay photo
Daniel Defoe photo

“It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.”

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) English trader, writer and journalist

Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 11, Finds Print of Man's Foot on the Sand.

“You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon.”

Adrian Henri (1932–2000) British poet

"Tonight at Noon", from The Mersey Sound (1967).

Amit Chaudhuri photo

“where the noon is a charged battery, and evening’s a visionary gloom’ ( St Cyril Road, Bombay )”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

St Cyril Road and Other Poems (2005)

“It was so flat, you know, you could see the curves of the earth. And when a train came into vision at nine o'clock in the morning, it was still leaving at noon.... it took that long to get across the prairie.”

Agnes Martin (1912–2004) American artist

In Mary Lance's intimate documentary 'With My Back to the World' (2002)
Martin's quote about the landscape of her youth in Macklin, Saskatchewan, where her parents Malcolm and Margaret Martin farmed the vast, sometimes hard land
after 2000

“Hui Shih was a man of many devices and his writings would fill five carriages. But his doctrines were jumbled and perverse and his words wide of the mark. His way of dealing with things may be seen from these sayings:
"The largest thing has nothing beyond it; it is called the One of largeness. The smallest thing has nothing within it; it is called the One of smallness."
"That which has no thickness cannot be piled up; yet it is a thousand li in dimension."
"Heaven is as low as earth; mountains and marshes are on the same level."
"The sun at noon is the sun setting. The thing born is the thing dying."
"Great similarities are different from little similarities; these are called the little similarities and differences. The ten thousand things are all similar and are all different; these are called the great similarities and differences."
"The southern region has no limit and yet has a limit."
"I set off for Yueh today and came there yesterday."
"Linked rings can be separated."
"I know the center of the world: it is north of Yen and south of Yueh."”

"Let love embrace the ten thousand things; Heaven and earth are a single body."
'With sayings such as these, Hui Shih tried to introduce a more magnanimous view of the world and to enlighten the rhetoricians.'
Zhuangzi, Ch. 33, as translated by Burton Watson (1968), p. 374; this contains the core of what has survived of Hui Shi's philosophy, most of the records of it having been eradicated in the vast "burning of books and burying of scholars" during the Legalism of the Qin dynasty.

William Langland photo
Peter Matthiessen photo

“Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place.”

The Snow Leopard (1978)
Context: The progress of the sciences toward theories of fundamental unity, cosmic symmetry (as in the unified field theory) — how do such theories differ, in the end, from that unity which Plato called “unspeakable” and “indiscribable,” the holistic knowledge shared by so many peoples of the earth, Christians included, before the advent of the industrial revolution made new barbarians of the peoples of the West? In the United States, before spiritualist foolishness at the end of the last century confused mysticism with “the occult” and tarnished both, William James wrote a master work of metaphysics; Emerson spoke of “the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One . . .”; Melville referred to “that profound silence, that only voice of God”; Walt Whitman celebrated the most ancient secret, that no God could be found “more divine than yourself.” And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon. Man must perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaningless, for no amount of “progress” can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.

Gustave Moreau photo

“I have designed a decorative and monumental work as a group of subjects representing the three ages of sacred and profane mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Iron Age. I have symbolised these different ages by dividing each one into compositions representing the three phases of the day: morning, noon and evening.
The Golden Age comprises three compositions (Adam and childhood):
:1. Prayer at sunrise.
:2. A walk in Paradise or the ecstasy before nature.
:3. All nature asleep.
The Silver Age. The second phase is taken from pagan mythology (Orpheus and youth):
:1. The dream nature is revealed to the senses of the inspired poet.
:2. The song.
: 3. Orpheus in the forest, his lyre broken and he longs for unknown countries and immortality.
The Iron Age (Cain and the maturity of man):
:1. The Sower making the earth productive (production).
:2. The Ploughman (work).
:3. Death (Cain and Abel).
Fourth panel:
The Triumph of Christ.
These three periods of humanity also correspond to the three periods in the life of a man:
The purity of childhood: Adam –
The poetic and unhappy aspirations of youth: Orpheus –
The grievous sufferings and death of mature age: Cain with the redemption of Christ.
D— thought it was an extremely ingenious and intelligent device to have used a figure from pagan antiquity for the cycle of youth and poetry instead of a Biblical figure, because intelligence and poetry are far better personified in these periods which were devoted to art and the imagination than in the Bible which is all sentiment and religiosity.
The Golden Age: the beginning of the world, naïveté, candour, purity. The morning: prayer. Noon: ecstasy and evening: sleep. No passion, nothing but elementary feelings. —
The Silver Age, corresponding to the civilization of humanity, already begins to feel emotion; it is the age of poets. I can only find this cycle in Greece. The morning: inspiration. Noon: song. Evening: tears. —
The Iron Age. Decadence and fall of humanity. I shall represent Cain ploughing and Abel sowing. Noon: Cain rests while Abel tends the altar of the Lord from which smoke, a symbol of purity, rises straight to the heavens. The evening: death at the hands of Cain.
The first death corresponds to the other deaths in the two other paintings: sleep and death of the senses; tears and the death of the heart. Do you understand the progression?
Sleep, though sad, is gentler than tears which, though painful, are gentler than death. Ecstasy is more delightful than song, which is gentler than work. Prayer is superior to dreaming which is more elevated than manual work.”

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) French painter

Notes to his mother, on The Life of Humanity (1884-6) http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/humanity-the-golden-age-depicting-three-scenes-from-the-lives-of-adam-and-eve-the-silver-age-1886, his composition of a ten image polyptych, p. 48 ·  Photo of its exhibition on the 3rd Floor of Musée National Gustave Moreau http://en.musee-moreau.fr/house-museum/studios/third-floor
Gustave Moreau (1972)

Bob Dylan photo

“Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
Context: Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 7
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

William Morris photo

“Morn shall meet noon
While the flower-stems yet move,
Though the wind dieth soon
And the clouds fade above.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song VII: Dawn Talks to Day
Context: Morn shall meet noon
While the flower-stems yet move,
Though the wind dieth soon
And the clouds fade above.
Loved lips are thine
As I tremble and hearken;
Bright thine eyes shine,
Though the leaves thy brow darken.
O Love, kiss me into silence, lest no word avail me,
Stay my head with thy bosom lest breath and life fail me!
O sweet day, O rich day, made long for our love!

Margaret Fuller photo

“I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed.”

Though "the Bard" is often reference to William Shakespeare, Fuller here probably uses the term in a generic sense, and in tribute to the poet-philosopher she considered in some ways her mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who may have made such a statement, which she elsewhere quotes as "I have witnessed many a shipwreck, yet still beat noble hearts".
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)
Context: I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed. Climbing the dusty hill, some fair effigies that once stood for symbols of human destiny have been broken; those I still have with me show defects in this broad light. Yet enough is left, even by experience, to point distinctly to the glories of that destiny; faint, but not to be mistaken streaks of the future day. I can say with the bard,
"Though many have suffered shipwreck, still beat noble hearts."
Always the soul says to us all, Cherish your best hopes as a faith, and abide by them in action. Such shall be the effectual fervent means to their fulfilment.

Henry Ward Beecher photo

“I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things ; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs ; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

The Nature, Importance and Liberties of Belief (1873)
Context: I look at a large tree on the lawn, and say to my neighbour: "What is that tree to you?" He looks at it, and says: "Well, I think that would cut about twenty cords of wood. You could work in a good many branches, and as the price of wood is in the market, I think I could make fifty dollars out of that tree easily, and perhaps more than that." His answer shows what the tree is to him — and it is that." I call up a boy, and say to him: "What do you think of when you look at that tree?" "Ah!" he says, "there will be a bushel of hickory-nuts on that tree, anyhow; and he begins to think how he will climb it, and shake them down, and what he will do with them. That is what the tree says to him. I say to another person: "What is that tree to you?" He says: "I would not take fifty dollars for it. Under it my cows stand in summer. The shade of that tree has stood me instead of a shed ever since I owned this farm. That tree is worth its weight in gold." He values it for its economic uses. I ask a painter: "What is that tree to you?" At once he says: "Do you see what an exquisite form it has? How picturesque it is? If you were to take it and put it in the foreground of the landscape that I am working on, what a magnificent effect you would get!" It has an aesthetic value to him. I ask another man: "What is it to you?" He goes into an explanation of its structure and qualities. He is a botanist, and he has his peculiar view of it. I ask myself: "What is that tree?" It is everything. It is God's voice, when the winds are abroad. It is God's thought, when in the deep stillness of the noon it is silent. It is the house which God has built for a thousand birds. It is a harbour of comfort to weary men and to the cattle of the field. It is that which has in it the record of ages. There it has stood for a century. The winter could not kill it, and the summer could not destroy it. It is full of beauty and strength. It has in it all these things; and as different men look at it, each looks at so much of it as he needs; but it takes ten men to see everything that there is in that tree — and they all do not half see it.
So it is with truths. Men sort them. They bring different faculties to bear in considering them. One person has philosophical reason; another has factual reason. One man brings one part of his mind to it; another brings to it another part of his mind. The truth is larger than any one man's thought of it. The truth of God usually has relations that stretch out in such a way that men may see it very differently, and all of them be true in spots, although they do not have the whole truth.

Lorna Dee Cervantes photo

“I intended all of that. And this is what I like about this, and drawings like draw, like the gunman. I call this the shoot out, the high noon draw. That was also my intent as well as drawings; draw a bucket back to the cables and the whole idea about drawings…”

Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954) American writer

On how drawings are used in all of its forms as a recurrent theme in From the Cables of Genocide in “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes” https://opencourses.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/ENL9/Instructional%20Package/Texts//Readings/Chicana%20Movement-%20Further%20Reading/An%20Interview%20with%20Lorna%20Dee%20Cervantes.pdf (Spring 2007)

William Faulkner photo
Toni Morrison photo
George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston photo

“The symbol of Empire in its noon-tide splendour.”

George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) British politician

Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 5.
About Curzon

Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Shulgi photo

“The orders are rigorous: you should not neglect your work load. They are to proceed with the building work by night and in the heat of noon. You will not be sleeping during the night or in the heat of noon!”

Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, Letter from Shulgi to Puzur-Shulgi about work on the fortress Igi-hursanga http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section3/tr3108.htm

Cormac McCarthy photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Charles Bukowski photo

“I'm just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: Jsem jen alkoholik, co se stal spisovatelem, aby mohl zůstat v posteli do poledne.

Alec Baldwin photo

“Noone loves the second amendment and due process more than me. Maybe we just take everyone's guns away. Nobody is allowed to have a gun, not even whites.”

Alec Baldwin (1954) American actor, writer, producer, and comedian

4 March 2018 https://www.cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2018/03/04/snl-trump-alec-baldwin-gun-control-orig-gs.cnn/video/playlists/snl-politics/

Winston S. Churchill photo

“By noon it was clear that the Socialists would have a majority.”

The Second World War (1948–1953)
Source: On the (July 26, 1945) landslide electoral defeat that turned him out of office near the end of WWII, in The Second World War, Volume VI: Triumph and Tragedy (1953), Chapter 40 (The End of My Account), p. 583.
Context: At luncheon my wife said to me, 'It may well be a blessing in disguise. 'I replied, 'At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.'