Quotes about sunset

A collection of quotes on the topic of sunset, likeness, life, beauty.

Quotes about sunset

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be… When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner"… I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

Carl R. Rogers (1902–1987) American psychologist

Source: "Freedom to learn" (1969), p.236.
Source: A Way of Being

People

“I always say that the times in my life when I've been happiest are the times when I've seen, like, a sunset.”

Chris Evans (actor) (1981) American actor

Life, Time

“Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

292
Source: Stray Birds (1916)

Life

“Bring me the sunset in a cup.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Men, Children, Freedom

“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”

Henry Rollins (1961) American singer-songwriter

Beauty, Life, Beauty, Loneliness

“I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Letter announcing Alzheimer's diagnosis http://www.nationalreview.com/document/reagan_sunset200406070915.asp (5 November 1994) Post-presidency (1989&ndash;2004) Context: In closing, let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your president. When the Lord calls me home, whenever that day may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future. I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Thank you, my friends. May God always bless you.

Life, God

“My child, let your life come into the world of darkness
like a spark of light, without flicker and pure,
and thank them in silence. You know,
my child, they are cruel in their greed and envy,
their words are disguised knives thirsting for blood.
But do not be afraid, my child, go and stand in their hearts,
and let your gentle eyes fall on them like the forgiving serenity of the night.
My child, let them see your face and so they know it
meaning of all things, let them love and love one another.
Go, at sunrise, open and lift up your heart like a blooming flower,
and at sunset, bend your head and silently complete the worship of the day.
Remember, my child, gods and demons, ghosts and elves are fragments of one,
built by the hand of the abyss.
So, move on, go to the shore of the vast darkness,
there, is the Great Meeting of Children,
there, the sea gives a smile to the beach,
there, sing the waves facing death.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://dailywisdomwords.com/community-poetry/my-child/

God, Light, Silence, Children

“Her heart was made of liquid sunsets.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Heart

“Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

As quoted in The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996) by Don Michael Randel
Context: Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little — the book of Nature.

Music, Mathematics, Parting

“Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson book Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1842), l. 54-62
Context: The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices.
Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

World, Star

“My soul is an empty carousel at sunset.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Soul

“Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

Source: Stray Birds

Silence

“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Suffering

“There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Mathematics, Suicide

“I don't know. They could put up a warning sign or something. Hello. Welcome to Hindstrap. We will murder you in the night and eat your bloody face if you stay past sunset. Try the pies. Martna Maily makes them fresh daily.”

Robert Jordan The Wheel of Time

Source: The Gathering Storm

Past, Night

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Life

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando

“The owl of wisdom flies, as is well known, after sunset. Thus the theory of a "socialist" system of money and prices was developed only after twilight of inflationist illusions.”

Leon Trotsky book The Revolution Betrayed

Source: The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Ch. 4, Section 3 : The Rehabilitation of the Ruble

Wisdom, Money

“I don't work that way. Part of it has to do with an idea of beauty. Sunsets, flowers, landscapes: these kinds of things don't move me to do anything. I just want to leave them alone. My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other. It’s not that I think I can change that, but it’s such a frustrating part of human history”

Bruce Nauman (1941) American artist

Source: Robert C. Morgan (2002). Bruce Nauman, p. 281

People, Beauty, Way, History

“One of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Of the Arabic call to prayer — as quoted in "Obama: Man of the World" by Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times (March 6, 2007) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=0 2007

“We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 1 (p. 3).

“At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna Loved her for the last time and left... That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt So dead that he asked, What is wrong, Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said, Not not at all, but thought, What is It to the corpse if the maggots nip?”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Kamala Suraiyya Das (The Descendants)

Love, Kiss, Time, Night

“My father taught me that the sea is full of signs. Let's say we leave on a voyage at sunset. At midnight the navigator listens for chirping birds. You and I don't hear them—we can't hear them. Only the navigator can hear them.”

Mau Piailug (1932–2010) Micronesian navigator from the Carolinian island of Satawal and a teacher of traditional, non-instrument wa…

The Last Navigator (1987)

Bird, Sea

“He was the chief of all the horses; and when he snorted, it was a flash of lightning and his eyes were like the sunset star.”

Black Elk (1863–1950) Oglala Lakota leader

Black Elk Speaks (1961)

Star, Horse

“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction.”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 10
Context: It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.

“But I loved that house, and I hated to say good-bye. Because, it was more than just a house. It was every summer, every boat ride, every sunset. It was Susannah.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: It's Not Summer Without You

Love, Hate, Summer, Housing

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Good Morning, Beauty, Way

“But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

World, Beauty, Art, Music

“How do our lives ravel out
into the no-wind, no-sound,
the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:
echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:
in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,
dead gestures of dolls.”

William Faulkner book As I Lay Dying

Source: As I Lay Dying

Dead

“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”

Barbara W. Tuchman book The Guns of August

Source: The Guns of August

World, History, Sun

“I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.”

Aleister Crowley book The Book of the Law

Source: The Book of the Law (1904)

Daughters, Night

“the tired sunsets and the tired
people -
it takes a lifetime to die and
no time at
all.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

People, Time

“For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Nostalgia

“I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it.”

George MacDonald book Phantastes

Source: Phantastes

Departure

“I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths

Men, Water, Country

“Sunsets, like childhood, are viewed with wonder not just because they are beautiful but because they are fleeting.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Gift

Beauty, Childhood

“Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

'Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing,' he agrees.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Shadowfever

Love, Life, Hunger, Hell

“Sunset is the saddest light there is.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Light

“Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.”

Italo Calvino book Invisible Cities

Source: Invisible Cities

Star

“You want proof there's a God? Look outside, watch a sunset.”

Frank E. Peretti (1951) American writer

God

“The sunset you see is always better than the one you don’t. More stars are always better than less.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Star

“We have a saying that time has no single measure, that time can be like frost or lightning or a tear or siege or storm or sunset, or even like a rock.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun

Tear, Time

“Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight, p. 4

Nostalgia

“After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

Star

“If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a "genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.”

Robert M. Sapolsky book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Source: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Strong

“Would you complain because a beautiful sunset doesn't have a future or a shooting star a payoff? And why should romance 'lead anywhere'? Passion isn't a path through the woods. Passionthe woods.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Source: Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Beauty, Star, Passion, Future

“Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Women

“The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.”

“No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Love, World, Beauty, Dreams

“What swells inside me is a love so boundless, I am the sunrise and sunset. I am Liberty Bell in the Cascades. I am Beihai Lake. I am every beautiful, truly beautiful, thing I've ever seen, captured in my personal Geographia, the atlas of myself.”

Justina Chen (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

Love, Beauty, Personality

“Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Age, Childhood, Painting

“Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Shadowrise

Light

“In silence the three of them looked at the sunset and thought about God.”

Maud Hart Lovelace book Betsy-Tacy and Tib

Source: Betsy-Tacy and Tib

God, Silence

“Beauty doesn't have to beanything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto?”

Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt

Source: The Salmon of Doubt

Beauty, Flowers

“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”

Ryū Murakami book Coin Locker Babies

Source: Coin Locker Babies (1980)

World, Sun

“You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.”

Tasha Tudor (1915–2008) American illustrator and writer

Source: The Private World of Tasha Tudor

Lie

“That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Dreams

“Orange? Like Effie's hair?" I say.
"A bit more muted," he says. "More like sunset.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“Yeah." He took one last look at the cityscape of Rome, turning bloodred in the sunset. "Festus, raise the sails. We've got some friends to save.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

“The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz & Other Stories

Mountain

“I want to see your tailpipe fading off into the sunset."
Good luck, I thought. My tailpipe was somewhere on Route 1, along with my muffler.”

Janet Evanovich book One for the Money

Source: One for the Money

“Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole world.”

Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923) American writer

Life, World, Beauty, Star

“It is man's consolation that the future is to be a sunrise instead of a sunset.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Que l'avenir soit un orient au lieu d'être un couchant, c'est la consolation de l'homme.
Part I, Book II, Chapter II, Section V
William Shakespeare (1864)
Source: Les Misérables

Future

“Sunsets we always liked because they only happen once and go away."
"But, Lena, that's sad."
"No, if the sunset stayed and we got bored, that would be a real sadness.”

Ray Bradbury book Dandelion Wine

Source: Dandelion Wine

Sadness

“There's a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they're absolutely free. Don't miss so many of them.”

Jo Walton (1964) Welsh Canadian writer

“Patrick started running after the sunset. And Sam immediately followed him. And I saw them in silhouette. Running after the sun.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Sun

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Flowers

“It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.”

Margaret Atwood book Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

Source: Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

Sense

“Why does it have to be so hard? Why can't it be a happily-ever-after ride-into-the-sunset feeling all the time?”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Feeling, Time

“… with white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

Natalie Babbitt book Tuck Everlasting

Source: Tuck Everlasting

Color

“The scattered tea goes with the leaves and every day a sunset dies.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Tea

“Because I can count on my fingers the number of sunsets I have left, and I don't want to miss any of them.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

“…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.”

Sharon Kay Penman book When Christ and His Saints Slept

Source: When Christ and His Saints Slept

Summer

“That memorable day died in purple and gold, and just as the last traces of the sunset faded in the west and the star-lilies filled the sky, the full moon looked down over the rim of the valley, and the great rocks, catching the silvery glow, came forth out of the dusky shadows like very spirits.”

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

" A Rival of the Yosemite: The Cañon of the South Fork of King's River, California http://books.google.com/books?id=fWoiAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA77" The Century Magazine, volume XLIII, number 1 (November 1891) pages 77-97 (at page 86) 1890s

Star

“All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like god in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1920s, A Peck of Gold (1926)

God, Children, Appearance

“I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,
Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,
Like actors in ancient plays.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

J'ai vu le soleil bas, taché d'horreurs mystiques, Illuminant de longs figements violets, Pareils à des acteurs de drames très-antiques. St. 9 Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

“Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer — black father, Portuguese mother — writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Paris Review Interview (1990)

Pleasure, Books, Reading

“Pure and undimmed, thy angel smile
Is mirrored on my dreams,
Like evening's sunset-girded isle
Upon her shadowed streams:
And o'er my thoughts thy vision floats,
Like melody of spring-bird, notes;
When the blue halcyon gently laves
His plumage in the flashing waves.”

Park Benjamin, Sr. (1809–1864) American journalist

To a young girl.

Smile, Dreams, Angels, Spring

“The gray-green stretch of sandy grass,
Indefinitely desolate;
A sea of lead, a sky of slate;
Already autumn in the air, alas!
One stark monotony of stone,
The long hotel, acutely white,
Against the after-sunset light
Withers gray-green, and takes the grass's tone.”

Arthur Symons (1865–1945) British poet

Color Studies. At Dieppe (1895).

Autumn, Light, Grass, Sea

“My songs were once of the sunrise:
They shouted it over the bar;
First-footing the dawns, they flourished,
And flamed with the morning star.

My songs are now of the sunset:
Their brows are touched with light,
But their feet are lost in the shadows
And wet with the dews of night.”

William Ernest Henley (1849–1903) English poet, critic and editor

"Envoy"
Poems (1898)

Star, Light, Night

“The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.”

Willa Cather book Youth and the Bright Medusa

Youth and the Bright Medusa, "A Wagner Matinee" (1920)

War, World, Peace

“I caught a glimpse of sun rays filtering through a window, thus lighting up a portion of this magnificent building. I was racing against the sun, desperately trying to finish my sketch before the light disappeared. I knew I had only an hour and a half before sunset.”

Wahbi Al-Hariri (1914–1994) Artist, architect, author

Source: Lisa Kaaki (2002-01-25). Wahbi Al-Hariri - the last of the classicists http://www.webcitation.org/6HcrXOzJ5. Arab News. Saudi Research & Publishing Company.

Light, Sun

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog's yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum's scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother's retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J. D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"Westward The Course Of Empire Takes Its Way", Girl With Curious Hair
Short stories

Love, Dogs, Feeling, Fashion

“A cottonwood leaf beetle scuttled out of the loosened earth, frantic legs working the sandy dirt, orange and black body desperate for a new hiding place. The sunset was fading, and a bloated ocher moon pushed its way into the dark blue sky.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“Family Cucurbita” The MacGuffin, Vol. XXVII No. 1 (Fall, 2010)
2010-

Way

“I'll always be a fan of ol' stray dogs and guitars playin'.
One room churches, back road walks and front porch swingin'.
Sunset skies, bonfire nights, I love the simple things.
That's how I'll always be.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

How I'll Always Be
Song lyrics, Damn Country Music (2015)

Love, Dogs, Night

“I brought Durand eight pictures, among them my 'Sunset' and the motif done from my window. They have been praised, but I find them poor, - tame, grey, monotonous, - I am not at all satisfied. - I am working with fury and I have finally discovered the right execution, the search for which has tormented me for a year. I am pretty sure I have it now, all I need is to spend this coming autumn in Rouen or in some other place where I can find striking motifs.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, from Osny, February 1884, in a letter to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 61
1880's

Search, Autumn

“Whence is yonder flower so strangely bright?
Would the sunset's last reflected shine
Flame so red from that dead flush of light?
Dark with passion is its lifted line,
Hot, alive, amid the falling night.”

Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) U.S. poet

Cardinal Flower, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 89.

Flowers, Light, Passion, Night

“The sciences certainly have influenced the arts. To an Aztec, the sunset was an inexplicable event, which he could not cope with or even survive without the imagined aid of his gods. Obvious phenomena of this sort have since been explained. But the sheer unimagined vastness of the explicable has now made the inexplicable into such a monstrous thing that our heads spin, and the old images burst like bubbles. The thought of the totally inexplicable (as when we look at the starry sky), and the impossibility of reading any sense into this monstrous vastness, so affect us that we need ignorance to survive.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

God, Art, Imagination, Sense

“Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman’s axe lies free,
And the reaper’s work is done.”

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet

Tyrolese Evening Song, st. 1.

Tree, Past

“Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour -- when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time -- a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Time, Sun

“After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Darwinia

Source: Darwinia (1998), Chapter 8 (p. 80)

God, Indifference

“On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile.”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

Smile, Dreams, Light, Wine

“Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? … A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Quotation and Originality

Men, People, Truth, Books

“I must stop to lament, that we cannot evince an admiring gratitude towards other excellent things by a like readiness of quotation: that we cannot, for instance, quote a star that we have been watching; or a hue of sunset; or a friend's voice, and his shake of the hand (I had almost said heart); or a beautiful picture—a Claude or Titian, for example.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations"
Sketches from Life (1846)

Beauty, Quotes, Star, Heart

“Overhead the swallows dipped down to catch bugs rising from the ground. Then they soared back up beyond the barracks. Hannah watched them for a moment, scarcely breathing. It was as if all nature ignored what went on in the camp. There were brilliant sunsets and soft breezes. Around the commandant’s house, bright flowers were teased by the wind. Once she’d seen a fox cross the meadow to disappear into the forest.”

Jane Yolen book The Devil's Arithmetic

Source: The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), p. 154

Flowers, Nature, Housing

“Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Footnote Iliad 18: 239-242 (cf: 2: 412-18); Joshua 10: 13-14
Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible

Time, Sun, Victory

“A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

On Richard Wagner as quoted in TIME (7 December 1953)

Beauty