Quotes about sky
page 9

“Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 3

Smile, Tear, Sea

“I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

Dreams, Mountain

“Go to sleep, you stunning sky, gently creep, cunning by
A quiet hum is amplified by your thumb that you suck dry
A hundred raging waters snare the lonely sigh
Hold your breath and clasp at Cassiopeia.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Cassiopeia
The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

Sleep, Water, Rage

“The young girl stood beside me. I
Saw not what her young eyes could see:
—A light, she said, not of the sky
Lives somewhere in the Orange Tree.”

Shaw Neilson (1872–1942) Early twentieth century Australian poet

Ballad and Lyrical Poems (1923), "The Orange Tree"

Girl, Tree, Light

“I believe nothing. I have shut myself away from the rocks and wisdoms of ages, and from the so-called great teachers of all time, and perhaps because of that isolation I am given to bizarre hospitalities. I shut the front door upon Christ and Einstein, and at the back door hold out a welcoming hand to little frogs and periwinkles. I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matter for beliefs. But I accept, with reservations that give me freedom to ridicule the statement at any other time, that showers of an edible substance that has not been traced to an origin upon this earth, have fallen from the sky, in Asia Minor.”

Charles Fort book Lo!

Pt 1, Ch. 3 http://www.resologist.net/lo103.htm; part of this has sometimes been misquoted as: "I cannot accept that the products of the mind are subject-matter for belief." Lo! (1931)

Wisdom, Age, Freedom, Teachers

“There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us,
But he thinks he'd blow our minds.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Starman
Song lyrics, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972)

Thinking, Waiting

“You could have a steam train
If you'd just lay down your tracks.
You could have an aeroplane flying
If you bring your blue sky back.All you do is call me.
I'll be anything you need.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Sledgehammer
Song lyrics, So (1986)

Flying, Training

“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I'm overwhelmed when I see, in an immense sky, the crescent of the moon, or the sun. There, in my pictures, tiny forms in huge empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains - everything which is bare has always greatly impressed me.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

from: English Wikipedia, Joan Miró, 1958, as quoted in Twentieth-Century Artists on Art, ed. Dore Ashton, 1986
1940 - 1960

Sun

“On nights like this he would stop the horse and lay back and look at the stars, the haunches moving under his back. It is so like humans to think there is more out there than there is here. They are greedy for the water to be more and for the land to be more and even greedy for the sky to be more.”

Robert Olmstead (1954) American writer

Far Bright Star (2009)

Star, Thinking, Water, Horse

“Woana was the most talented, amazing and prodigious human in the world, and the most beautiful too. For Woana, if she had summoned them, those bright eyes in the sky would have danced down to earth; but naturally Woana was far too sophisticated to stoop to such a thing. Woana was, in fact, unrivalled, peerless. The reason being that Mitz belonged to her, and Mitz’s feline ego would never consider that anyone, but the most sublime, could have acquired her own exceptional self.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 17 (p. 144)

World, Beauty, Nature, Dance

“Today I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters —... But some way or other I didn't seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept walking - The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and some times sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it -. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at — the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon. Well I just sat there and had a great time by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind —... I wondered what you were doing - It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldn't tell which house was home - I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Canyon, Texas (September 11, 1916), pp. 183-184
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Love, Way, Home, Tree

“The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and left her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp.”

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) English author, poet and diarist

January 25, 1798 Compare Wordsworth's "A Night-Piece", lines 1-16 http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww123.html. Diaries

Star, Light, Strong

“Likewise, gleefully describing the Hindu predicament under the Sultanate, Amir Khusrau puts this statement into the mouth of a subdued Raja; ‘Thanks to the perennial, well established convention of the world, the Hindu has all along been a game of the Turks. The relationship between the Turk and the Hindu cannot be described better than that the Turk is like a tiger and the Hindu, a deer. It has been a long established rule of the whirling sky that the Hindus exist for the sake of the Turk. Being triumphant over them, whenever the Turk chooses to make an inroad upon them, he catches them, buys them, and sells them at will. Since the Hindu happens to be a (wretched) slave in all respects, none need exercise force on his slave. It does not become one to scowl at a goat which is being reared for one’s meals. Why should one wield a sharp sword for one who will die by (just) a fierce look?”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

Amir Khusrow, quoted from Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990) p. 17 https://archive.org/details/MythOfCompositeCultureHarshNarain

World, Exercises, Game

“The stars are dreaming
but they are laughing
I see myself in the smile of a polar bear
while turning the pages of an arctic sky
reading the delirious lines that
foretell the sovereignty of language
and the rule of invisible birds”

Nancy Peters (1936) American writer and publisher

It's In the Wind (1977) "Ceremonies In A Polar Garden"
1970s

Smile, Dreams, Star, Bird

“Is there any death here in our camp? Yes, yes! Three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, the noblest band that ever trod the earth, died to make this camp a camp of glory and of liberty forever. But there are no dead issues here. There are no dead ideas here. Hang out our banner from under the blue sky this night, until it shall sweep the green turf under your feet. It hangs over our camp. Read away up under the stars the inscription we have written on it, lo these twenty-five years.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, An Appeal to Young Men (1879)

Death, Star, Idea, Reading

“How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures; nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain,
Breaks the serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths;
Beneath her steady ray
The desert circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

Thalaba the Destroyer http://www.litgothic.com/Texts/thalaba_frag.html, Bk. I, st. 1 (1800).

Beauty, Night

“I believe that people want to turn from fear towards hope, from divisiveness towards unity, from intolerance to an understanding that we all belong to one great community. Within all the chaos, within the despair, the not knowing, the anger, the anxiety, there is always the possibility for change. There is a seed of hope. And I'm not talking about a pie-in-the-sky kind of hope, but a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to stand up and be counted — a kind of hope that calls on each and every one of us to give the very best of ourselves — not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all of us, collectively.”

Jennifer Beals (1963) American actress and a former teen model

Speech at LGBT Community Center's 25th Anniversary and 11th Annual Women's Event, New York, New York (1 November 2009) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/speeches/womens11.html.

People, Fear, Hope, Communication

“Slayer of the Winter, art thou here again?
O welcome, thou that bring'st the Summer nigh!
The bitter wind makes not thy victory vain,
Nor will we mock thee for thy faint blue sky.”

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

"March".
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)

Art, Winter, Victory, Summer

“And in the morning when the sun rise.
Look in the water, see the blue sky.
As if heaven has been laid there at our feet.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Sausalito
Conor Oberst (2008)

Water, Sun

“If all the sky was made of gold leaf, and the air was starred with fine silver, and treasure borne on all the winds, and every drop of sea-water was a florin, and it rained down, morning and evening, riches, goods, honours, jewels, money, till all the people were filled with it, and I stood there naked in such rain and wind, never a drop of it would fall on me.”

Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) French poet

Se tout le ciel estoit de feuilles d'or,
Et li airs fust estellés d'argent fin,
Et tous les vens fussent pleins de tresor,
Et les gouttes fussent toutes florin
D'eaue de mer, et pleust soir et matin
Richesses, biens, honeurs, joiaux, argent,
Tant que rempli en fust toute la gent,
La terre aussi en fust mouillee toute,
Et fusse nu, – de tel pluie et tel vent
Ja sur mon cors n'en cherroit une goutte.
"Se tout le ciel estoit de feuilles d'or", line 1; text and translation from Brian Woledge (ed.) The Penguin Book of French Verse, 1: To the Fifteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1961] 1968) p. 236.

Money, People, Star, Water

“The moon is darkened in the sky
As if grief 's shade were passing by;”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

“I want to know but I can't see are you up there. I don't have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”

Samuel R. Delany book Dhalgren

Part VII, "The Anathēmata" (p. 801)
Dhalgren (1975)

Tree, Light, Waiting

“A growing belief that behind every event lay intention—be it an evil thought in the mind of another, or the benevolent whim of a god in the sky—was perhaps inevitable in creatures with an innate understanding of causality. If you were smart enough to make multicomponent tools, you eventually came to believe in gods, the end of all causal chains. There would be costs, of course. In the future, to serve their new gods and shamans, the people would have to sacrifice much: time, wealth, even the right to have children. Sometimes they would even have to lay down their lives. But the payback was that they no longer had to be afraid of dying.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 11 “Mother’s People” section IV (pp. 370-371)

God, Children, People, Understanding

“Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.”

Miguel de Unamuno book San Manuel Bueno, Mártir

San Manuel Bueno, Mártir (1933), Prologue

Life, People, Dreams, Suicide

“I have such a passion for painting! I am continually working at form. In actual drawing and in my head, and during my sleep. Sometimes I think I shall go mad, this painful, sensual pleasures tires and torments me so much. Everything else vanishes, time and space, and I think of nothing but how to paint the head of the resurrected Christ... Or how shall I paint Minkchen [his wife Minna] now, with her knees drawn up and her head leaning on her hand against the yellow wall with her rose, or the sparkling light in the dazzling whiteness of the anti-aircraft shell-bursts in the leaden, sun drenched sky…”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

letter to his first wife Minna, from the front, 11 May, 1915; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 213
1900s - 1920s

Pain, Pleasure, Thinking, Sleep

“Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

To a Waterfowl http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page20, st. 2 (1815)

Distant, Painting

“Work and pray,
Live on hay.
You’ll get pie
In the sky
When you die—
It’s a lie!”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“Bread Overhead” (p. 121); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1958; alluding to the song The Preacher and the Slave.
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

Lie

“A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, st. ? (1799).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star

“Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Wrongly

Future

“Saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all!”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I, l. 330
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

Men

“Ian McEwan: I guess my starting point would be: the brain is responsible for consciousness, and we can be reasonably sure that when that brain ceases to be, when it falls apart and decomposes, that will be the end of us. From that quite a lot of things follow, especially morally. We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness, and we therefore have which one can work towards and maybe make sacrifices, and, crucially, make sacrifices of other people. We have a marvellous gift, and you see it develop in children, this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own and feelings that are just as important as your own, and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.Richard Dawkins: I profoundly agree with you, and I've always felt that one of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.Ian McEwan: And if you have a sacred text that tells you how the world began or what the relationship is between this sky-god and you, it does curtail your curiosity, it cuts off a source of wonder. The loveliness of the world in its wondrousness is not apparent to me in Islam or Christianity and all the other major religions.”

Ian McEwan (1948) British author

from The Root of All Evil?, Channel 4 documentary, United Kingdom (January 2006).

God, Children, People, World

“… We talked while the full moon mounted in the sky, words filling up the narrow space between us, as much a buffer as a link. Hours passed and then suddenly at my foot there was a wriggle of the soil. A kangaroo mouse emerged, a creature that I have never otherwise seen except fleeing at a distance. I put my hand on the man’s shoulder to call his attention to this surprise, and we fell silent and watched the strangely fearless mouse do its work for a long time, then resumed the conversation more slowly and more softly as the creature continued to refine its tunnel entrance and the mound of gravelly earth at its mouth, indifferent to our presence. Bats swooped down and snatched invisible meals from the air, and coyotes began to howl, more of them, closer and more persistently than I’ve ever heard before or since, a whole orchestra of drawn-out cries into the dawn.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Time, Indifference

“But our bird knew not of the free blue air,
He had lived in his cage, and his home was there :
No flight had he in the green wood flown —
He pined not for freedom he never had known!
If he had lived amid leaf and bough
It had been cruel to fetter him now;
For I have seen a poor bird die,
And all for love of his native sky.”

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

The Dead Robin
Traits and Trials of Early Life (1836)

Love, Home, Bird, Freedom

“So my great love for thee lies tranquil, deep,
Forever; though above it passions fierce,
Ambition, hatred, jealousy; like waves
That seem from earth’s core to the sky to leap,
But ocean’s depths can never really pierce;
Hide its great calm, while all the surface raves.”

Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet

"Sonnet II" in Scribner's Monthly Vol. IX (November 1874 - April 1875), p. 359.

Love, Jealousy, Passion

“At least when the Emperor Justinian, a sky-god man, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our sky-godders, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that looney text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"America First? America Last? America at Last?," Lowell Lecture, Harvard University (20 April 1992).
1990s

God, Hate, Quotes

“One should herd the entire intelligentsia into a mine and then blow it sky-high.”

Heinrich Müller (1900–1945) German police official and head of the Gestapo

Quoted in The Third Reich: A New History (2001) - Page 191

“In relations with others, one should express resentment and anger openly and straightforwardly. If one cannot express them openly and straightforwardly, the only thing to do is forget about them. To harbor grievances in one's heart, awaiting some later opportunity to give vent to them, is to act like a weak and petty man-in truth, it can only be called cowardice. The mind of the superior man is like Heaven. When it is resentful or angry, it thunders forth its indignation. But once having loosed its feelings, it is like a sunny day with a clear sky: within the heart there remains not the trace of a cloud. Such is the beauty of true manliness.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. III.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Truth, Beauty, Feeling, Heart

“We’re best at the long high throws. Like when you take four or five steps and rip it— It’s almost like a shotput approach, the steps, four or five quick, one over the other, kind of sideways-like—and then you slash away with that fucker, it’s such a violent act, throwing that white thing, you’re first cradling it to your breast and then you whip that fucker as hard as you can while keeping it level, keeping it straight, but otherwise with everything you can send with it you whip that fucker like it had blades on it and you wanted it to cut straight through the paperblue sky like a screen, rip through it and have it be blood and back space beyond.”

Dave Eggers (1970) memoirist, novelist, short story writer, editor, publisher

A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (2000)

“Is it, in Heav'n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For those who greatly think, or bravely die?”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 6.

Love, Lovers, Thinking, Heart

“The rains tumble down in the sky,
Young swallows have learned how to fly,
The leaves that were green are no longer so green,
And it looks like the summer is over.”

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

Song Summer Is Over.

Learning, Summer, Flying

“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

"Removal" (July 1938)
One Man's Meat (1942)

World, Peace

“On earth there are frontiers, in the sky there are none.”

Edmund Cooper (1926–1982) British writer

The cloud walker (1973)

“I would like evolution to join the roster of other discredited religions, like the Cargo Cult of the South Pacific. Practitioners of Cargo Cult believed that manufactured products were created by ancestral spirits, and if they imitated what they had seen the white man do, they could cause airplanes to appear out of the sky, bringing valuable cargo like radios and TVs. So they constructed “airport towers” out of bamboo and “headphones” out of coconuts and waited for the airplanes to come with the cargo. It may sound silly, but in defense of the Cargo Cult, they did not wait as long for evidence supporting their theory as the Darwinists have waited for evidence supporting theirs.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2006, Human Events interview (2006)

Religion, Support, Appearance, Waiting

“Though not large it had a certain elegance; a pilastered portico, windows with graceful pediments. The whitewashed façade was in shadow, a palid blue against the evening sky’s pale blue.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

“In comparing civilized man with the animal world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all, the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean furnaces—of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory. But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of intellectual sublimity, to the mere aesthetic intuition of the uninstructed beholder.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 131-132

World, Travel, Mountain, Animals

“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

“The boat set sail upon the great river
whose swollen waters stretched to sky's edge.
Sky and waves split apart suddenly—
the district capital's thousands of homes.
Moving on, I can see the town market
and vaguely make out mulberry and hemp.
I turn to gaze back toward my homeland—
only vast floods that stretch to the clouds.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"Written Crossing the Yellow River to Qing-he" (渡河到清河作)

Home, Water

“I'm empty, here at the edge of the sky.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Poem on Night" (trans. Jan W. Walls), in Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, eds. Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo (1975), p. 139

“A Frenchman cried and Connelly squatted beside him, took the man's hand, and talked of Ireland. He told the uncomprehending Frenchman of Connaught's beauty, of its women, of fields so fat that a lamb was full grown in a week, of rivers so thick that the fish begged to be caught, and the Frenchman quieted and Connelly patted his hair and told him he was brave, and he was proud of him, and beyond the small grating the sky darkened into dusk and the orderlies came down again and dragged the Frenchman, who had died, head-bumping up the steps.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 184
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Sword (1983)

Women, Beauty, Fish

“The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1910s, My November Guest (1915)

Beauty, Thinking, Tree

“Universal truth is not measured in mass appeal, this is the last time I kneel and pray to the sky, cause almost everything I was ever told was a lie”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

The Point of No Return
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

Truth, Lie, Universe, Time

“Do not be cross with the child; you cannot afford it. If you are cultivating a plant, developing it into something finer and nobler, you must love it, not hate it; be gentle with it, not abusive; be firm, never harsh. I give the plants upon which I am at work in a test, whether a single one or a hundred thousand, the best possible environment. So should it be with a child, if you want to develop it in right ways. Let the children have music, let them have pictures, let them have laughter, let them have a good time; not an idle time but one full of cheerful occupation. Surround them with all the beautiful things you can. Plants should be given sun and air and the blue sky; give them to your boys and girls. …for all the years. We cannot treat a plant tenderly one day and harshly the next; they cannot stand it. Remember that you are training not only for to-day, but for all the future, for all posterity.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Love, Hate, Children, Beauty

“I scrawled Song Birds across the blue
stuck the sticky note to my wall.
Needed to remember
there was a time people cut out
the tongues of Song Birds
to eat them as delicacies.
That afternoon I went outside
and thousands of Song Birds
filled the Rosscarrock sky.
I cried a song of remorse.”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Autopsy of a Turvy World"
Autopsy of a Turvy World (2008)

People, Bird, Time

“Safe were those evenings of the pre-war world
When firelight shone on green linoleum,
I heard the church bells hollowing out the sky,
Deep beyond deep, like never-ending stars.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

Summoned By Bells (1960).
Poetry

War, World, Star

“The sky is as much an essential part of the picture as any other part of it, and indeed, in very many instances, constitutes the key-note and important feature of the whole idea.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Clouds. Their use, and practical instructions as to how to photography them, p. 92

Idea, Parting

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

Love, Color, Spring, Christ

“It seems odd to think of you at Lake George tonight – I can smell the outdoors – and hear it – and see the stars – So often before I went to bed at night I would walk out toward the barn and look at the sky in the open space. There was no light little house – there were no people – there was only the night – I will never go back again – maybe to stand just for a moment where I put the little bit that was left of Alfred [ Alfred Stieglitz, her husband] after he was cremated – but I think not even for that. I put him where he would hear the lake.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

That is finished.
In a letter to William Howard Schubart, (nephew of her died husband), Abiquiu, New Mexico, August 4, 1950; as quoted in Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, pp. 228-29
1950 - 1970

People, Star, Thinking, Light

“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Forgotten Home http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21398/Forgotten_Home From the poems written in English

Singing

“The view we enjoyed from the summit [of Mount Rainier] could hardly be surpassed in sublimity and grandeur; but one feels far from home so high in the sky, so much so that one is inclined to guess that, apart from the acquisition of knowledge and the exhilaration of climbing, more pleasure is to be found at the foot of the mountains than on their tops. Doubly happy, however, is the man to whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine there illumine all that lies below.”

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

"Washington and the Puget Sound" in Picturesque California (1888-1890); reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 20
1880s

Happiness, Pleasure, Feeling, Home

“the roads lay under us in white quilts
the telegraph-wires jerked tight and wrote
mantras on the sky”

Lajos Kassák The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away

"A ló meghal a madarak kirepülnek" ("The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Away"), 1922, translated by Edwin Morgan

Jerk

“Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold,
Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold;
Forget not oft to lift the hope on high;
The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky.

And by that lovely light, all truth-revealed,
The cherished forms which sad distrust concealed,
Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand,
The kindred angels of a faithful band;
Ruby and ebon cross both cast aside,
No lamp is needed, for the night has died.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux

Love, Truth, Sadness, Faith

“Your face had become dark, and, upon the day's awakening, your ashes will disperse themselves throughout the garden.
Your ashes will fly to the sky, to make love with the stars.
Sandy, Sandy, your ashes caress the rainbow flowers that tickle the blue of the sky.
[short poem of Miro, on the death of his good old art-paw, the inventor of the 'mobile', Sandy Calder ]”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

1961 and later
Source: his 'Foreword', Barcelona 1977; as quoted in Calder Miro, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 309

Love, Death, Making love, Art

“The sun was out, the sun was rising in the sky. Importantly the rooster strode across the floor, hopped up to a window sill, filled his chest, and crowed a mighty crow— to crow the sun up in the sky and sunlight into his busy hen house.”

Meindert DeJong book Along Came a Dog

Along Came a Dog (1958)

Business, Sun, Housing

“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Memories of President Lincoln, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star, Spring, Night

“I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), pp. 1120-1121
The Second World War (1939–1945)

War, Country

“When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill…But be willing to die for your choice.”

Tim Powers book The Anubis Gates

Source: The Anubis Gates (1983), Chapter 1 (pp. 3-4)

Youth, Universe, Sun, Night

“King whom one cannot reach in the distant sky! Suen whom one cannot reach in the distant sky! King who loves justice, who hates evil! Suen who loves justice, who hates evil! Justice brings joy justly to your heart.”

Lugalbanda

In Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave, Ur III Period (21st century BCE). http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.2.1#

Love, Hate, Justice, Distant

“He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.”

D.H. Lawrence book Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers (1913)

Love, Dogs, Soul

“The earth cracks and
is shriveled up;
the wind moans piteously;
the sky goes out
if you should fail.”

William Carlos Williams book Al Que Quiere!

"Chicory and Daisies"
Al Que Quiere! (1917)

“I have been all men known to history,
Wondering at the world and at time passing;
I have seen evil, and the light blessing
Innocent love under a spring sky.”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Taliesin 1952"
Song at the Year's Turning (1955)

Love, Men, World, History

“Thou rising Sun! thou blue rejoicing Sky!
Yea! every thing that is and will be free!
Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be,
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty.”

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

"France: An Ode", st. 1 (1798)

Sun

“From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither; here am I.”

A.E. Housman book A Shropshire Lad

No. 32.
A Shropshire Lad (1896)

Life

“.. when the terrible storm and high flood of water raged most fearfully, I went to Schevelinge…. sea and sky seemed to be one [undivided] element; at the height where I stood - because the sea had already washed away dunes and stood up to the village – the view was horrible; the wailing of the inhabitants awful. - when arriving home, I immediately put a sketch of all this on paper - but that sketch represented so little of what I had seen on the spot itself…. [where] no part turned up itself of which I could make a sketch…. [so it] will be necessary for me to return to Scheveningen again and to outline those places where the water has raged most violently.. (translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Andreas Schelfhout (1787–1870) Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer

(original Dutch, citaat van Schelfhout, uit zijn brief:) ..toen den verschrikkelijke storm en hogen watervloed allerverschrikkelijkst woede, begaf ik mij naar Schevelinge [=Scheveningen].. ..zee en lucht scheene een element te zijn; op de hoogte waar ik stond, want de zee had reeds duinen weggespoeld en stond tot aan het dorp, was het gezigt verschrikkelijk; het gejammer der bewoners akelig. - bij mijne thuiskomst heb ik echter dadelijk een schets daarvan op papier gebragt - doch die schets voldoet zo weinig, aan het geen men terplaatse zelve zag.. ..[waar] geen partij zig op deed waar van eigenlijk een tekening te maken was.. ..[dus] zal het nodig zijn dat ik [mij] nog een andere maal naar Scheveningen begeeft en die punten waar het water het meest gewoeld heeft afteschetsen..
Quote of Schelfhout in his letter to , 10 Feb. 1825; the original letter is in the collection of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Den Haag, inv. Nr: 133 C12, nr. 4

Home, Water, Rage, Parting

“But Master, Sky-heart, Knight of our fairer dream,
You do still tread this day;
Nor bows nor spears shall stay your steps.
You walk through all our arrows.”

Khalil Gibran book Jesus, The Son of Man

A Man From Lebanon: Nineteen Centuries Afterward
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)

Dreams, Heart

“But no clouds in a red sky promised daylight's return, nor in lessening shadows did a long twilight gleam with reflected sun. Black night that no ray can pierce comes ever denser from earth, veiling the heavens.”
Sed nec puniceo rediturum nubila caelo promisere jubar, nec rarescentibus umbris longa repercusso nituere crepuscula Phoebo: densior a terris et nulli peruia flammae subtexit nox atra polos.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book I, Line 342

Sun, Night

“Franz Kafka is dead.He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. […] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love (2005), P. 187

Children, People, Books, World

“Two or three o'clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It's already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy... On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and Cézanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Quote in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 29-30
Chagall describes a morning in his studio in Paris, c. 1911, in 'La Ruche' an old factory where many artists as Soutine, Archipenko, Léger and Modigliani had their studio
1920's, My life (1922)

God, Lie, Way, Painting

“Great undulating banners red as blood. And the brass bands. And the manly thud of uniformly set-down boots. And the rage inside the happy shouts. A hundred thousand spleens have found a mouth. Curtains of sperm are flung up the side of the sky. Hell has fertilized heaven. And now the hero comes—the trumpet of his people. And his voice is enlarged like a movie's lion. He roars, he screams so well for everyone, his tantrums tame a people. He is the Son of God, if God is Resentment. And God is Resentment—a pharaoh for the disappointed people.”

William H. Gass book The Tunnel

The Tunnel (1995)

God, Happiness, People, Disappointment

“Beyond the cloud-wrapt chambers of western gloom and Aethiopia's other realm there stands a motionless grove, impenetrable by any star; beneath it the hollow recesses of a deep and rocky cave run far into a mountain, where the slow hand of Nature has set the halls of lazy Sleep and his untroubled dwelling. The threshold is guarded by shady Quiet and dull Forgetfulness and torpid Sloth with ever drowsy countenance. Ease, and Silence with folded wings sit mute in the forecourt and drive the blustering winds from the roof-top, and forbid the branches to sway, and take away their warblings from the birds. No roar of the sea is here, though all the shores be sounding, nor yet of the sky; the very torrent that runs down the deep valley nigh the cave is silent among the rocks and boulders; by its side are sable herds, and sheep reclining one and all upon the ground; the fresh buds wither, and a breath from the earth makes the grasses sink and fail. Within, glowing Mulciber had carved a thousand likenesses of the god: here wreathed Pleasure clings to his side, here Labour drooping to repose bears him company, here he shares a couch with Bacchus, there with Love, the child of Mars. Further within, in the secret places of the palace he lies with Death also, but that dread image is seen by none. These are but pictures: he himself beneath humid caverns rests upon coverlets heaped with slumbrous flowers, his garments reek, and the cushions are warm with his sluggish body, and above the bed a dark vapour rises from his breathing mouth. One hand holds up the locks that fall from his left temple, from the other drops his neglected horn.”
Stat super occiduae nebulosa cubilia Noctis Aethiopasque alios, nulli penetrabilis astro, lucus iners, subterque cavis graue rupibus antrum it uacuum in montem, qua desidis atria Somni securumque larem segnis Natura locavit. limen opaca Quies et pigra Oblivio servant et numquam vigili torpens Ignauia vultu. Otia vestibulo pressisque Silentia pennis muta sedent abiguntque truces a culmine ventos et ramos errare vetant et murmura demunt alitibus. non hic pelagi, licet omnia clament litora, non ullus caeli fragor; ipse profundis vallibus effugiens speluncae proximus amnis saxa inter scopulosque tacet: nigrantia circum armenta omne solo recubat pecus, et nova marcent germina, terrarumque inclinat spiritus herbas. mille intus simulacra dei caelaverat ardens Mulciber: hic haeret lateri redimita Voluptas, hic comes in requiem vergens Labor, est ubi Baccho, est ubi Martigenae socium puluinar Amori obtinet. interius tecti in penetralibus altis et cum Morte jacet, nullique ea tristis imago cernitur. hae species. ipse autem umentia subter antra soporifero stipatos flore tapetas incubat; exhalant vestes et corpore pigro strata calent, supraque torum niger efflat anhelo ore vapor; manus haec fusos a tempore laevo sustentat crines, haec cornu oblita remisit.

Statius book Thebaid

Source: Thebaid, Book X, Line 84 (tr. J. H. Mozley)

Love, Death, God, Pleasure

“Three hackney-coaches, and two women in patterns passed by; also a man with an umbrella dripping, which he held rather over a brown paper parcel than himself: at last, a bright spot appeared just above the palace, the rain seemed to melt into luminous streaks on the sky, and the rain-drops that had sprinkled all over the panes of glass began to gather into two or three large drops, and to descend slowly along the surface. They would have done to bet upon, but there was no one to bet with.”

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

The Monthly Magazine

Women, Appearance

“There are the breezes of early morning; for the sun on emerging from beneath the earth strikes humid air as he returns, and as he goes climbing up the sky he spreads it out before him, extracting breezes from the vapor that was there before the dawn.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 11

Sun

“I have [drawings of] about twelve figures of diggers and men who are working in a potato field, and I wonder if I could not make something of it, you have still a few, for instance, a man who fills a bag with potatoes. Well, I do not know for sure, but sooner or later I shall accomplish that, for I looked at it so attentively this summer, and here in the dunes I could make a good study of the earth and the sky, and then boldly put in the figures.”

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

Quote in letter 169, from The Hague, January, 1882; as cited in Vincent van Gogh, Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, catalog-page: Dutch Period: - 4. Potato Diggers 1880s, 1882

Men, Study, Summer, Drawing

“Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Six (p. 178).

“You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 40: 'The Law'

World, Country

“When he was dead I raised myself to my feet and I looked about me. Everything was still. A loneliness had come upon my soul.
There was darkness everywhere now but in the forest. And even here there were wisps of grey, as if evil crept in.
I lifted my head to the sky and I shook my fist. “Oh, I reject you. I reject your Heaven and I reject your Hell. Do as you wish with me, but know that your desires are petty and your ambitions have no meaning!””

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

I addressed no one. I addressed the universe. I addressed a void.

Chapter 15 (p. 154)
The von Bek family, The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981)

Soul, Hell, Universe, Evil

“There are two things in the world that can never get on together—religion and common sense. Religion deals with the next life, common sense with this; religion points to the sky, common sense to the earth; religion is all imagination, common sense all reason; religion deals with what nobody can understand, common sense with what everybody can understand; religion gives us no return for our investments but flash notes on the bank of expectation, common sense gives us good interest and full security for our capital. They are as opposite as two things can possibly be, and they are always at strife. Religion is always trying to fill the world with delusions, and common sense is always trying to drive them away. Religion says Live for the next world, and common sense says Live for this.”

George William Foote (1850–1915) British secularist and journal editor

"Christianity and Common Sense" http://www.ftarchives.net/foote/flowers/114commonsense.htm, p. 114 Flowers of Freethought (1893)

Life, World, Religion, Imagination

“Nothing will remain of the armies of the living and of the dead, of the dreams of the gods and the bravery of their warriors, nothing but ash.
Soon after, the swollen ocean will swallow the ashes as it washes across all the land, and everything living will be forgotten under the sunless sky.
That is how the worlds will end, in ash and flood, in darkness and in ice. That is the final destiny of the gods.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 279)

God, World, Dreams, Dead

“Like a marble statue placed,
Looking o'er the watery waste,
With its white fixed gaze;
There the Goddess sits, her eye
Raised to the unpitying sky;”

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

The Monthly Magazine

“The swarm of ducks so darkens the sky that poor Europe does not know which way to go”

Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor

original French text: 'La nuée des canards obscurcissant tellement l'air que la pauvre Europe ne sait plus quel chemin prendre' title/caption in Daumier's print; published in 'La Caricature', 1833-35; number 3601 in the catalogue raisonné by Loys Delteil, Le peintre-graveur illustré, Vol. 28 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969); as quoted on samfoxschool http://samfoxschool.wustl.edu/node/11263#footnote-1-ref The word 'canards' refers to physical ducks; it also means unfounded rumors or exaggerated stories. Ducks, symbolizing rumors was a visual motif Daumier used both before and after this print 1830's

Way

“Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory.”

Frances Ridley Havergal (1836–1879) British poet and hymn-writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 399.

Love, Joy, Christ, Drawing

“Time, time, time, see what's become of me,
While I looked around for my possibilities,
I was so hard to please,
But look around, the leaves are brown,
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

A Hazy Shade of Winter
Song lyrics, Bookends (1968)

Winter, Time

“Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.
Surely the earth, that's wise being very old,
Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold
Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I
May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,
Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.
We'll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll'd,
Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

The Choice

Love, Drink, Wine, Change

“We wait -- it seems for minutes -- looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear… there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Fear, Silence, Waiting, Heart

“The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 1 (p. 9; opening line)

Sun

“I like it, murder, because this is courage. It is anti-bourgeois. Murder is closer to heaven, because after becoming 'remords de conscience', one prays, one opens the sky, and the angels say, 'Good morning!”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Dali interviewed by Victor Bockris, 1974

Angels, Courage

“There are most certainly two distinguishable kinds of truths, “truths of reason” (that two plus two equals four) and “truths of fact” (that the sky appears blue). By his resort to his daimon Socrates added the class of “truths of self,” personal truths.”

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), p. 7

Truth, Appearance, Personality

“In the spring of 1920, General Motors found itself, as it appeared at the moment, in a good position. On account of the limitation of automotive production during the war there was a great shortage of cars. Every car that could be produced was produced and could be sold at almost any price. So far as any one could see, there was no reason why that prosperity should not continue for a time at least. I liken our position then to a big ship in the ocean. We were sailing along at full speed, the sun was shining, and there was no cloud in the sky that would indicate an approaching storm. Many of you have, of course, crossed the ocean and you can visualize just that sort of a picture yet what happened? In September of that year, almost over night, values commenced to fall. The liquidation from the inflated prices resulting from the war had set in. Practically all schedules or a large part of them were cancelled. Inventory commenced to roll in, and, before it was realized what was happening, this great ship of ours was in the midst of a terrific storm. As a matter of fact, before control could be obtained General Motors found itself in a position of having to go to its bankers for loans aggregating $80,000,000 and although, as we look at things from today's standpoint, that isn't such a very large amount of money, yet when you must have $80,000,000 and haven't got it, it becomes an enormous sum of money, and if we had not had the confidence and support of the strongest banking interests our ship could never have weathered the storm.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Alfred P. Sloan in The Turning Wheel, 1934, p. 185-6; Retrospective vein President Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., addressing the automobile editors of American newspapers at the Proving Ground at Milford, Michigan in 1927.

Money, War, Cars, Confidence

“Truth as clear and blue as the sky we walk under. Love as bright and loud as the lightning and thunder. Peace as pure and white as the moon, so full of wonder. So many different colours of Islam!”

Dawud Wharnsby (1972) Canadian musician

"Colours of Islam"
Colours of Islam (1998)

Love, Truth, Peace