Quotes about wind
page 8

“I have grown weary of the winds of heaven.
I will not be a reed to hold the sound
Of whatsoever breath the gods may blow,
Turning my torment into music for them.
They gave me life; the gift was bountiful,
I lived with the swift singing strength of fire,
Seeking for beauty as a flame for fuel —
Beauty in all things and in every hour.
The gods have given life — I gave them song;
The debt is paid and now I turn to go.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Sappho (Rivers to the Sea)"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Life, God, Beauty, Music

“Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"In Defense of the Fence," http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=39WorldNetDaily.com, April 4, 2008. 2000s, 2008

“Even the wind lay still,
Our essence was fire and cold and movement, movement…
Oh, if they ask you for the sign of the father in you,
Tell them it's movement, movement, movement and… repose.”

Aaron Weiss

Paper-Hanger.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

“Often sit alone happy happy
Thoughts somewhat far gone gone
Clouds circle mountain soft soft
Wind through valley swish swish
Ape in tree bounce bounce
Bird in forest chirp chirp
Time turns hair gray gray
Winter is here sad sad”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Happiness, Sadness, Mountain, Bird

“A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. "The ancient Greeks," I say, "who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?"”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 14

Future

“A wind fane changabil huf puffe
Always is a woomman.”

Richard Stanyhurst

The Fovrth Booke
The First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis (1582)

“Al Utbi, the author of Tarikh-i-Yamini, writes how Sultan Mahmud punished Nawasa Shah: “Satan had got the better of Nawasa Shah, for he was again apostatizing towards the pit of plural worship, and had thrown off the slough of Islam, and held conversation with the chiefs of idolatry respecting the casting off the firm rope of religion from his neck. So the Sultan went swifter than the wind in that direction, and made the sword reek with the blood of his enemies. He turned Nawasa Shah out of his government, took possession of all the treasures which he had accumulated, re-assumed the government, and then cut down the harvest of idolatry with the sickle of his sword and spear. After God had granted him this and the previous victory, which were tried witnesses as to his exalted state and proselytism, he returned without difficulty to Ghazna.””

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

Utbi, in Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 2
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

God, Religion, Victory

“The earth belongs to nobody except the wind.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (1960) Former Prime Minister of Spain

At the 15th Climate Change Summit, Copenhagen, 17th December 2009. Source: http://noticias.lainformacion.com/medio-ambiente/zapatero-desconcierta-a-todos-con-su-frase-sobre-la-tierra-y-el-viento_sEhELshTqdhjO0fz7EJwe2/ As President, 2008

“Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002)

People, Way, Travel, History

“.. the wind of 'art brut' blows on writing as well as on other avenues of artistic creation.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quote in the text of Jean Dubuffet, 'Project pour un petit texte liminaire introduisant les publications de 'L'art brut dans l'écrire', 1969 (1969), published in Le Langage de la rupture', Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978
1960-70's

Art

“Misunderstood ain’t got to be explained but you don’t understand me so let me explain, stood in the heat the flame the snow, please slow down hurricane, the wind blows my dreads swang, he had hair like wool like Wayne uhh, droppin ashes in da bible I shake them out and they fall on da rifle, scary hale Mary no tale fairy all really very extraordinary.”

Lil Wayne (1982) American rapper, singer, record executive and businessman

Misunderstood/Don't Get It
Official Mix tapes, The Leak (2007)

Understanding

“As for the piano, I was left to my own devices practically from the age of twelve. As is frequently the case in teachers' families, our parents were so busy with their pupils (literally from morning until late at night) that they hardly had any time for their own children. And that, in spite of the fact that with the favourable prejudice common to all parents, they had a very high opinion of my gifts. (I myself had a much more sober attitude. I was always aware of a great many faults although at times I felt that I had in me something "not quite usual".) But I won't speak of this. As a pianist, I am known. My good and bad points are known and nobody can be interested in my "prehistoric period". I will only say that because of this early "independence" I did a lot of silly things which I could have easily avoided if I had been under the vigilant eye of an experienced and intelligent teacher for another three or four years. I lacked what is known as a "school". I lacked discipline. But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good; my enforced independence compelled me, though sometimes by very devious ways, to achieve a great deal on my own and even my failures and errors subsequently proved more than once to be useful and educational, and in an occupation such as learning to master an art, where if not all, then almost all depends on individuality, the only sound foundation will always be the knowledge gained as the result of personal effort and personal experience.”

Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) Soviet musician

The Art of Piano Playing (1958), Ch. 1. The Artistic Image of a Musical Composition

Children, Age, Education, School

“These Peerless thump their chests in salute to me. The monsters. They go with the wind, chasing power. But they don't realize power doesn't shift. Power is resolute. It is the mountain, not the wind. To shift so easily is to lose trust. And trust is what has kept me alive. Trust in my friends, and their trust in me.”

Pierce Brown book Golden Son

Source: Golden Son (2015), Ch. 35: Teatime

Mountain

“As darkness falls
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit halls which reach no end.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Secret, Music, Flowers, Light

“Sit and be still
until in the time
of no rain you hear
beneath the dry wind's
commotion in the trees
the sound of flowing
water among the rocks,
a stream unheard before,
and you are where
breathing is prayer.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Given (2005), Sabbaths 2001

Tree, Water, Time

“In business you wind up trying a lot of things, most of which won’t work. The way you become a good business person is to fail, fail, fail and fail.”

Bob Parsons (1950) United States Marine

Forbes: GoDaddy Billionaire Bob Parsons' 7 Tips for Entrepreneurs https://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2015/10/18/godaddy-billionaire-bob-parsons-7-tips-for-entrepreneurs/ (18 October 2015)

Way, Business, Personality

“Just as at first the South wind makes gentle sport as it softly stirs the leaves and topmost branches of the woodland, but soon the unlucky ships are feeling all its terrible strength.”
Velut ante comas ac summa cacumina silvae lenibus adludit flabris levis Auster, at illum protinus immanem miserae sensere carinae.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VI, Lines 664–666

Feeling, Sport

“The well known elevation of the pitch of wind instruments, in the course of playing, sometimes amounting to half a note, is not, as is commonly supposed, owing to any expansion of the instrument, for this should produce a contrary effect, but to the increased warmth of the air in the tube.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

"Outlines of Experiments and Inquiries Respecting Sound and Light" (1800)

“This appearance of the Evening was… just after a very heavy rain — more rain in the night and very — [? light] wind which continued all the — day following while making – this sketch observed the Moon easing – very beautifully… [in the] due East over the — heavy clouds from which the late showers – had fallen.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Inscription: 12 September, 1821, written on the back of 'Hampstead Heath, Sun setting over Harrow,' his sketch in oil on paper; as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London. 1993), p. 221
1820s

Light, Appearance, Night

“Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?”

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

Windy Nights, st. 1.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

Star, Night

“The sailor tells of winds, the ploughman of bulls,
the soldier counts his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.”
Navita de ventis, de tauris narrat arator, Enumerat miles vulnera, pastor oves.

Propertius (-47–-16 BC) Latin elegiac poet

II, i, 43–4.
Elegies

“And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.”

Robert W. Service (1874–1958) Canadian poet

The Shooting of Dan McGrew http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/service_r_w/dan_mcgrew.html (1907), The Cremation of Sam McGee http://www.wordinfo.info/words/index/info/view_unit/2640/?letter=C&spage=26

“Humanity will have to extricate itself from the bags created by false moralists, according to whom we taste happiness and then pass judgment on it, as if it were a piece of fruit. But I maintain that even for a piece of fruit we can do something to help it taste good. This is even truer of marriage and every other human relationship; these things are not meant to be tasted or passively accepted; they must be made. A relationship is not like a bit of shade where one is comfortable or uncomfortable depending on the weather and the way the wind is blowing. On the contrary, it is a place of miracles, where the magician makes the rain and the good weather.”

Alain (1868–1951) French philosopher

On Private Life
Alain On Happiness (1928)

Marriage, Happiness, Way, Help

“The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

A forsaken Garden.
Undated

“The way of the Wind is a strange, wild way.”

Ingram Crockett (1856–1936) American writer

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

Way

“They stood in silence, in their beauty: like two young trees of the plain, when the shower of spring is on their leaves, and the loud winds are laid.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Carric-thura". Compare:
Τὼ δ᾽ ἄνεῳ καὶ ἄναυδοι ἐφέστασαν ἀλλήλοισιν,
ἢ δρυσίν, ἢ μακρῇσιν ἐειδόμενοι ἐλάτῃσιν,
τε παρᾶσσον ἕκηλοι ἐν οὔρεσιν ἐρρίζωνται,
νηνεμίῃ· μετὰ δ᾽ αὖτις ὑπὸ ῥιπῆς ἀνέμοιο
κινύμεναι ὁμάδησαν ἀπείριτον.
The pair then faced each other, silent, unable to speak, like oaks or tall firs, which at first when there is no wind stand quiet and firmly rooted on the mountains, but afterwards stir in the wind and rustle together ceaselessly.
Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica (3rd century BC), Book III, lines 967–971 (tr. Richard Hunter)
The Poems of Ossian

Beauty, Spring, Tree, Silence

“Sudden and near the trumpet's notes out-spread,
And soon his eyes could see the metal flower,
Shining upturned, out on the morning pour
Its incense audible; could see a train
From out the street slow-winding on the plain
With lyres and cymbals, flutes and psalteries,
While men, youths, maids, in concert sang to these
With various throat, or in succession poured,
Or in full volume mingled. But one word
Ruled each recurrent rise and answering fall,
As when the multitudes adoring call
On some great name divine, their common soul,
The common need, love, joy, that knits them in one whole.
The word was "Jubal!"… "Jubal" filled the air,
And seemed to ride aloft, a spirit there,
Creator of the choir, the full-fraught strain
That grateful rolled itself to him again.
The aged man adust upon the bank
— Whom no eye saw — at first with rapture drank
The bliss of music, then, with swelling heart,
Felt, this was his own being's greater part,
The universal joy once born in him.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

Love, Men, Youth, Age

“5813. Words are but Wind; but seeing is believing.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us, except by making us produce and grow the wealth which they spend? They are clad in velvet and camlet lined with squirrel and ermine, while we go dressed in coarse cloth. They have the wines, the spices and the good bread: we have the rye, the husks and the straw, and we drink water. They have shelter and ease in their fine manors, and we have hardship and toil, the wind and the rain in the fields. And from us must come, from our labour, the things which keep them in luxury”

Jean Froissart (1337–1405) French writer

Et, se venons tout d'un père et d'une mere, Adam et Eve, en quoi poent il dire ne monstrer que il sont mieux signeur que nous, fors parce que il nous font gaaignier et labourer ce que il despendent? Il sont vestu de velours et de camocas fourés de vair et de gris, et nous sommes vesti de povres draps. Il ont les vins, les espisses et les bons pains, et nous avons le soille, le retrait et le paille, et buvons l'aige. Ils ont le sejour et les biaux manoirs, et nous avons le paine et le travail, et le pleue et le vent as camps, et faut que de nous viengne et de nostre labeur ce dont il tiennent les estas.
Book 2, p. 212.
Froissart is again quoting John Ball.
Chroniques (1369–1400)

Spring, Drink, Water, Wine

“The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.”

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

" Frost at Midnight http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Frost_at_Midnight.html", l. 1 (1798)

Secret

“Most human lives are forgotten after four generations. We build our splendid houses on the edge of the abyss then distract and dazzle ourselves with entertainers and sex while we slowly at first, then more rapidly, spin around the ever-thirsty plughole in the middle. My treasured possessions -- all the silly little mementoes and toys and special books I’ve carried with me for decades -- will wind up on flea market tables or rot on garbage heaps. Someone else will inhabit the rooms that were mine. Everything that was important to me will mean nothing to the countless generations that follow our own. In the grand sprawl of it all, I have no significance at all. I don’t believe a giant gaseous pensioner will reward or censure me when my body stops working and I don’t believe individual consciousness survives for long after brain death so I lack the consolations of religion. I wanted Annihilator to peek into that implacable moment where everything we are comes to an end so I had to follow the Black Brick Road all the way down and seriously consider the abject pointlessness of all human endeavours. I found these contemplations thrilling and I was drawn to research pure nihilism, which led me to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound and back to Ligotti. I have a fundamentally optimistic and positive view of human existence and the future and I think it’s important to face intelligent, well-argued challenges to that view on a regular basis. While I agree with Ligotti that the universe is, on the face of it, a blind emergent process, driven by chance over billions of years of trial and error to ultimately produce creatures capable of little more than flamboyant expressions of the agonizing awareness of their own imminent deaths, I don’t share his slightly huffy disappointment at this state of affairs. If the universe is intrinsically meaningless, if the mindless re-arrangement of atomic debris into temporarily arising then dissipating forms has no point, I can only ask, why do I see meaning everywhere, why can I find a point in everything? Why do other human beings like me seem to see meaning in everything too? If the sun is only an apocalyptic series of hydrogen fusion reactions, why does it look like an angel and inspire poetry? Why does the flesh and fur-covered bone and jelly of my cat’s face melt my heart? Is all that surging, roaring incandescent meaning inside me, or is it out there? “Meaning” to me is equivalent to “Magic.” The more significance we bring to things, even to the smallest and least important things, the more special, the more “magical” they seem to become. For all that materialistic science and existential philosophy tells us we live in a chaotic, meaningless universe, the evidence of my senses and the accounts of other human beings seem to indicate that, in fact, the whole universe and everything in it explodes second-to-second with beauty, horror, grandeur and significance when and wherever it comes into contact with consciousness. Therefore, it’s completely down to us to revel in our ability to make meaning, or not. Ligotti, like many extreme Buddhist philosophers, starts from the position that life is an agonizing, heartbreaking grave-bound veil of tears. This seems to be a somewhat hyperbolic view of human life; as far as I can see most of us round here muddle through ignoring death until it comes in close and life’s mostly all right with just enough significant episodes of sheer joy and connection and just enough sh-tty episodes of pain or fear. The notion that the whole span of our lives is no more than some dreadful rehearsal for hell may resonate with the deeply sensitive among us but by and large life is pretty okay generally for most of us. And for some, especially in the developed countries, “okay” equals luxurious. To focus on the moments of pain and fear we all experience and then to pretend they represent the totality of our conscious experience seems to me a little effete and indulgent. Most people don’t get to be born at all, ever. To see in that radiant impossibility only pointlessness, to see our experience as malignantly useless, as Ligotti does, seems to me a bit camp.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2014
http://www.blastr.com/2014-9-12/grant-morrisons-big-talk-getting-deep-writer-annihilator-multiversity
On life

Life, Death, Pain, People

“Climb the steep Cold Mountain way
Roads to Cold Mountain are many and never ending
The valleys are long and deep, the peaks piled high
The streams are wide, the grass is thick
The moss is slippery though there is no rain
The pines sigh though there is no wind
Who can escape the snares of the world
And come to sit with me among the white clouds?”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World, Way, Mountain, Grass

“[From Cecil Forrester]: Nothing like love-letters for filling up a rainy morning. A mistress gives a man such an interest in himself! You cannot run your fingers through your hair, without a vision of the locket wherein one of your curls reposes on the fairest neck in the world. An east-wind only conjures up a host of "sweet anxieties;" and if the worst comes to the worst, you can sit down and write sonnets to your inamorata's eyebrow.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love, World

“ATF, all you tyrannical people will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States. Remember the Nuremberg War Trials.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

As quoted in "Timothy McVeigh & Terry Nichols: Oklahoma Bombing" (2010), TruTv.

War, People

“Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen… Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean friends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movements. The black wind of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve… Populations blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide… Any number can play…”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Atrophied Preface
Naked Lunch (1959)

Life, Death, Fear, Penalty

“A grasshopper shrilled in a tuft at her feet and was answered by other shrillings among the gorse bushes; a solitary rook flapped heavily overhead, and a pair of goldfinches twittered among the thistle-down; there was no other sound except the scarcely perceptible never-ceasing sighing of the wind in the pines and its rustling of acres of heath-bells.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

Last chapter
Heatherly

“Only when we step back can we see that we have been reassembling something that can stand in the wind.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Introduction
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003)

“I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Her Kind"
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

Learning

“676. A little wind kindles, much puts out the fire.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

“I lay in the parlour between two beds to keep me from being frozen to death, for as we keep open house the winds enter from every quarter, and are apt to sweep into bed to me.”

Charles Dodgson (bishop) Anglican bishop

Quoted in Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), p. 4

Death, Housing

“And so I leave
On cruel winds
Squalling
And gusting me
Like a dead leaf
Falling.”

Paul Verlaine Chanson d'automne

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.
"Chanson d'automne", line 13, from Poèmes saturniens (1866); Sorrell p. 27

Dead

“I'm not sure the "remarkable Arctic warmth" is real, especially since the disappearance of arctic sea ice during that time has been linked not to warmer temperatures, but to wind patterns by other researchers at NASA.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

3 of 4 global metrics show nearly flat temperature anomaly in the last decade http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/08/3-of-4-global-metrics-show-nearly-flat-temperature-anomaly-in-the-last-decade/, wattsupwiththat.com, March 8 2008. 2008

Time, Sea

“The way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;
His withered cheek, and tresses gray,
Seemed to have known a better day.”

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Introduction
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

Way

“I'm weary, I'm weary,—this cold world of ours;
I will go dwell afar, with fairies and flowers.
....
I'm weary, I'm weary,—I'm off with the wind:
Can I find a worse fate than the one left behind?”

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

Fantasies, inscribed to T. Crofton Croker, Esq.
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Fate, World, Flowers

“But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 4, "Magelight" (Ged)

Men, World, Intelligence, Nature

“There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part I, l. 48
Christabel (written 1797–1801, published 1816)

Light, Dance

“We are sleeping on a volcano… A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Original text: Nous dormons sur un volcan… Ne voyez-vous pas que la terre commence à trembler. Le vent de la révolte souffle, la tempête est à l’horizon.
Speaking in the Chamber of Deputies just prior to to outbreak of revolution in Europe (1848).
1840s

Sleep

“You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.”

William March book Company K

Company K (1933)

Men, Color, Spring, Flowers

“My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam’s end, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area. I incline to the belief that the first is the more important and usual method….
My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about 15 miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.”

Wilbur Wright (1867–1912) American aviation pioneer

Letter to Octave Chanute (13 May 1900)

Business, Bird, Thinking, Animals

“Sex and politics - sex and politicians. I never understand how any politician gets a shag, really. Can you? A classic example: the David Mellor sex scandal. I bet you're the same as me. We're not shocked by these scandals involving politicians. I bet when that happened, your response was not 'Good God, that's outrageous! A man in his job, he should be running the country, not messing about like this; no wonder we're in a state; terrible!' No, that wasn't the response. You open the paper, you read about that, and you go 'Ha ha ha ha - I don't think so, Dave! I don't think so. In your dreams, perhaps.' The interesting person in that relationship is not him; it's her - Antonia. A woman of mystery; a mystery woman. Antonia de Sancha, always described as an 'unemployed actress'. Unemployed actress? How's she an unemployed actress? God! if you can feign sexual interest in David Mellor, I should think Chekhov's a piece of piss. So, she thinks 'I'm an actress. It's a role. I'll prepare'. She gets to the bedroom situation. He's in a kit-off situation, and there's Antonia giving it 'Red lorry, yellow lorry - Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper'. But the hair - that's the main unattractive thing. What barber told him that suited him? Someone winding him up there. 'Yes, David, that'll suit you, mate: a greasy, oily flap of dirty-looking patent leather, wafting about down one side of your moosh; that'll drive those unemployed actresses mental!' (Linda Live, 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

God, Dreams, Sex, Understanding

“My messages are temporary and shouldn’t be our permanent condition. And like the wind it will pass. We’ll have another wind coming.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Who Is Ai Weiwei?, 2009

“Winds and waters keep
A hush more dead than any sleep.”

William Allingham (1824–1889) Irish man of letters and poet

Ruined Chapel; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Sleep, Water, Dead

“The teacher offers guidance here and there, but the primary factor, the driving force, in your relationship and work together is the student's own commitment and desire to learn. Teaching is like sailing: The wind and the sails give the boat its motion. Your role (as a teacher) is to steer and guide.”

Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) American violinist and conductor

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin

Learning, Teachers

“It was so much like having sex with the wind. It complicated things and blew away and softly separated and slid back around him. The wire was about pain too: it would always be there, jutting into his feet, the weight of the bar, the dryness of the throat, the throb of his arms, but the joy was losing the pain so that it no longer mattered. So too with his breathing. He wanted his breath to enter the wire so that he was nothing. This sense of losing himself. Every nerve. Every cuticle. He hit it on the towers. The logic became unfixed. It was the point where there was no time. The wind was blowing and his body could have experienced it years in advance.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin (2009), The Ringing Grooves of Change

Pain, Sex, Sense, Time

“Autumn colors remind us we are all one dancing in the wind.”

Lorin Morgan-Richards (1975) American poet, cartoonist, and children's writer

Quote included in list https://www.simonandschuster.com/getliterary/our-favorite-literary-quotes-about-autumn/ "11 of Our Favorite Literary Quotes about Autumn” (23 September 2019).

Color, Autumn, Dance

“What is a bow and arrow?
It is the beginning of the end. It is the winding path that grows to the roaring road of war.
It is a plaything and a weapon and a triumph in human engineering.
It is the first faint stirring of an atom bomb.
It is a symbol of a way of life.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Source: City (1952), Chapter 7, “Aesop” (p. 210)

Life, War, Way

“Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.”

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) American writer and editor

The People, Yes http://books.google.com/books?id=bCSu8UHz9EUC&q=%22Man's+life+A+candle+in+the+wind+hoar+frost+on+stone%22&pg=PA509#v=onepage (1936)

Life

“A bell was rung. All the passengers came on deck. Never shall I forget the scene we then witnessed. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The sky was overspread with thick dark clouds. It looked like a vast temple at night, as the fitful, lurid sun cast a yellowish tinge resembling the pale light of the tapers near a catafalque. The foaming waves opened like immense tombs that seemed avid to swallow their first victim. When all was ready a porthole was opened, and a plank painted black, six feet long and three broad, was suspended over the deep. The body of a child, wrapped in a winding sheet, was placed upon it, with a large stone attached to the feet. For a minute or two the captain read -- I do not know what prayer. Profound silence reigned. The father scarcely shed a tear. The mother seemed quite unmoved. At a word spoken by the captain, the plank was raised in the air, and the next instant the light corpse glided into the waters. I made the Sign of the Cross over it, but alas, I do not know whether the child was even baptized. The passengers withdrew, apparently untouched by the scene, and some even smiled. How impiety deadens the heart!”

Théodore Guérin (1798–1856) Catholic saint and nun from France

Third Journal of Travel (1844-1845)

Smile, Tear, Light, Silence

“If only the wind could reach inside me, wipe clean my heartache, my guilt, my confusion. If only the waves could wash away this heartache, this jealousy and rage, this guilt and sadness. If only the rocks could lend me their stability, their strength, so I might choose wisely. If only the sun could burn away my past, so I would not have to live with any regrets.”

Valya Dudycz Lupescu (1974) American writer

The Silence of Trees (2010)

Sadness, Jealousy, Rage, Sun

“Sun, wind and water are
The best as I know
But it's on you, I
Think secretly
Sun, wind and water
High mountains and deep sea
That is my dream woven off.”

Kenneth Gärdestad (1948–2018) Swedish song lyricist, architect and lecturer

Sol, vind och vatten är
Det bästa som jag vet
Men det är på dig jag
Tänker I hemlighet
Sol, vind och vatten
Höga berg och djupa hav
Det, är mina drömmar vävda av
"Sol, vind och vatten", lyrics written by Kenneth
Song lyrics, With Ted Gärdestad, Ted (1973)

Dreams, Mountain, Thinking, Water

“Tumult, weeping, many new ghosts.
Heartbroken, aging, alone, I sing
To myself. Ragged mist settles
In the spreading dusk. Snow skurries
In the coiling wind. The wineglass
Is spilled. The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.”

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

"Snow Storm" (对雪), as translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971), p. 6

Men, Age, Singing

“There can be times at sea when a ship is tossed
by two different winds, one of which propels
it forward while the other one is crossed
or retrograde, and among the powerful swells
it turns and yaws as if the crew were lost.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Come ne l'alto mar legno talora,
Che da duo venti sia percosso e vinto,
Ch'ora uno inanzi l'ha mandato, ed ora
Un altro al primo termine respinto,
E l'han girato da poppa e da prora.
Canto XXI, stanza 53 (tr. D. R. Slavitt)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Time, Sea

“The greying east brightened, metamorphosed to pink, then red, and then the giant ball of fire rose out of the blackened hills. Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Death, Secret, Memory, Night

“Tiers of mountains
Cold wind feet
Not need fan
Ice cold through
Moon shines bright
Mist covers everything
Sit all alone
One old man”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain

“At my door the leaves are falling;
A cold wild wind has come.
Sweethearts walk by together;
And I still miss someone.”

Johnny Cash (1932–2003) American singer-songwriter

I Still Miss Someone, written by Johnny Cash and Roy Cash
Song lyrics, The Fabulous Johnny Cash (1958)

“Back when a hoe was a hoe.
Coke was a coke.
And crack's what you were doing.
When you were cracking jokes.
Back when a screw was a screw.
The wind was all that blew.
And when you said I'm down with that.
Well, it meant you had the flu.
I miss back when.
I miss back when.
I miss back when.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

Back When
Song lyrics, Live Like You Were Dying (2004)

“On the top of the wall lay a structure of burnt brick, about a foot and a half in height, under the tiles and projecting like a coping. …when the tiles on the roof are broken or thrown down by the wind so that rain-water can leak through, this burnt brick coating will prevent the crude brick from being damaged, and the cornice-like projection will throw off the drops beyond the vertical face, and thus the walls, though of crude brick structure, will be preserved intact.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VIII, Sec. 18

Water

“A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven….”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

Source: Literary Years and War (1900-1918), The Riddle Of The Sands (1903), p. 217.

“And takes forth a Caucasian herb, of potency sure beyond all others, sprung of the gore that dropped from the liver of Prometheus, and grass wind-nurtured, fostered and strengthened by that blood divine among snows and grisly frosts.”
Et, qua sibi fida magis vis nulla, Prometheae florem de sanguine fibrae promit nutritaque gramina monti, quae sacer ille nives inter tristesque pruinas durat alitque cruor.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 355–359

Grass

“Outside, the main doors behind him, he was hit full in the chest by autumn. The doggy wind leapt about him and nipped; leaves skirred along the pavement, the scrape of the ferrules of sticks; melancholy, that tetrasyllable, sat on a plinth in the middle of the square. English autumn, and the whistling tiny souls of the dead round the war memorial.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Doctor is Sick (1960)

War, Soul, Autumn, Memory

“With the thermometer at 30 below zero and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street in Winnipeg knows which side of him is which.”

Stephen Leacock (1869–1944) writer and economist

My Discovery of the West (1937)j

“Good rain is coming to our delight.
Its early-spring timing is perfectly right.
With wind it drifts in all through the night.
Silently it's drenching everything in sight.”

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

"Welcome Rain in a Spring Night" (《春夜喜雨》), as translated by Ying Sun http://www.musicated.com/syh/tangpoems.htm (2008)

Spring, Time, Night

“A summer isle, one over which the wind
Hath ever pass'd in melody,— such airs
As are born in the rose's breast, and die
Like singing on the waters.”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Water, Singing, Summer

“And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Earth's Magnetic Field Has Massive Breach – scientists baffled http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/16/earths-magnetic-field-has-massive-breach-scientists-baffled/, wattsupwiththat.com, December 16, 2008. 2008

Universe

“Last night I couldn't sleep till after four in the morning – I had been out to the canyon all afternoon – till late at night – wonderful color – I wish I could tell you how big – and with the night the colors deeper and darker – cattle on the pastures in the bottom looked line little pinheads. I can understand Pa Dow painting his pretty colored canyons – it must have been a great temptation – no wonder he fell. Then the moon rose right up out of the ground after we got out on the plains again – battered a little where he bumped his head but enormous – There was no wind – it was just big and still – so very big and still – long legged jack rabbits hopping across in front of the light as we passed – A great place to see the night time because there is nothing else.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

then I came home – not sleepy so I made a pattern of some flowers I had picked – They were like waterlilies – white ones – with the quality of smoothness gone.
Canyon, Texas, (September 14, 1916), pp. 186, 187
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color, Home, Flowers, Understanding

“The Goldberg Variations are, as explained in my booklet-text, in short, music that observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music that, like Baudelaire’s lovers, “rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.” Gould is referring here to the circular design of the work, a circularity whose development is polarized, inspired, and fed by more and more new energy fields. The result is a universe that in its significance resembles the alpha and omega of music in general, music that evolves out of nothing and disappears back into nothing as if in a state in which time stands still.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Music, Lovers, Universe, Time

“.. And his painting is like the wind, like a breeze blowing the paint across the canvas, so unreal, so loose and far away from the worldly life.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Life, Painting

“Often we were joined by Maurice Princet. Although very young, he held an important post in an insurance company which he owed to his knowledge of mathematics. But outside his profession it was as an artist that he thought of mathematics, as a specialist in aesthetics that he evoked continuities in n dimensions. He liked to interest painters in the new visions of space that had been opened up by Victor Schlegel and several others. He succeeded. After having heard him by chance, Henri Matisse was caught reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh! it was only a potboiler [un ouvrage de vulgarisation]! but at least that shows that for the great 'fauve' the days of the painter who knows nothing, who runs towards a pretty subject with his beard blowing in the wind, was passed.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Mathematics, Knowledge, Chance, Reading

“The wind in which the dead leaves blow.
Here I inhale profounder strength
And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Thinking, Dead

“Start a new fashion, wear your heart on your sleeve
Sometimes you reach what's real just by making believe
Unafraid, unashamed
There is joy to be claimed in this world
You even might wind up being glad to be you.”

Stephen Schwartz (1948) American musical theatre lyricist and composer

Ever Ever After
Enchanted (2007)

World, Fashion, Heart, Joy

“Great Carthage low in ashes cold doth lie,
Her ruins poor the herbs in height scant pass,
So cities fall, so perish kingdoms high,
Their pride and pomp lies hid in sand and grass:
Then why should mortal man repine to die,
Whose life, is air; breath, wind; and body, glass?”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Giace l'alta Cartago; appena i segni
Dell'alte sue ruine il lido serba.
Muojono le città, muojono i regni;
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba;
E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni:
O nostra mente cupida e superba!
Canto XV, stanza 20 (tr. Fairfax)
Max Wickert's translation:
: Exalted Carthage lies full low. The signs
of her great ruin fade upon the strand.
So dies each city, so each realm declines,
its pomp and glory lost in scrub and sand,
and mortal man to see it sighs and pines.
(Ah, greed and pride! when will you understand?)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Life, Lie, Grass

“She hurried at his words, beset with fears,
For there were sleeping dragons all around,
At glaring watch, perhaps, with ready spears —
Down the wide stairs a darkling way they found. —
In all the house was heard no human sound.
A chain-droop’d lamp was flickering by each door;
The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound,
Flutter’d in the besieging wind’s uproar;
And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor.”

John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

Stanza 40
Poems (1820), The Eve of St. Agnes

Fear, Way, Sleep, Housing

“And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Lucy Gray, or Solitude, st. 16 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Singing

“It was a distance about twice as long as this room; then there was a wall, and just beyond it the crematory. When the wind blew in at the south I got smoke in my cell. It was a fat smoke, big flakes of smoke - human smoke.”

Franz Halder (1884–1972) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, April 5, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Sourced Encyclopedia of the Third Reich Louis L. Snyder

“Billy Bennett – I speak of the artist – was forthright, bawdy, and wholesome…[His] grossness had that gusto about it which is like a high wind blowing over a noisome place.”

Billy Bennett (1887–1942) British comedian

James Agate Immoment Toys (New York, [1945] 1969) p. 225.
Criticism

“The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Pain, Dreams

“A life on the ocean wave!
A home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!
Like an eagle caged I pine
On this dull unchanging shore:
Oh give me the flashing brine,
The spray and the tempest's roar!”

Epes Sargent A Life on the Ocean Wave

A Life on the Ocean Wave, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life, Home, Water

“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" Binsey Poplars http://www.bartleby.com/122/19.html", lines 1-8 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Sun

“The end of the world—was the sky going to open up, would the angels pour down the vials of wrath on a shaking land, and would God appear to judge the sons of men? He listened for the noise of great galloping hoofs, but there was only the wind in the trees.
That was the worst of it. The sky didn’t care. The Earth went on turning through an endlessness of dark and silence, and what happened in the thin scum seething over its crust didn’t matter.”

Poul Anderson book Brain Wave

Source: Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 5 (p. 40)

Men, God, World, Angels

“"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
"Often have I been to it,
"Even to its highest tower,
"From whence the world looks black.""Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
"A shadow, a phantom;
"Long have I pursued it,
"But never have I touched
"The hem of its garment."And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.”

Stephen Crane book The Black Riders and Other Lines

Source: The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895), XXVIII

Truth, World, Travel

“On a prayer,
In a song,
I hear your voice,
And it keeps me hanging on.
Oh, raining down, against the wind,
I'm reaching out,
'Till we reach the circle's end.
When you come back to me again.”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

When You Come Back to Me Again, written by Jenny Yates and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Scarecrow (2001)

“Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007—and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence.”

Amory B. Lovins (1947) American physicist

Missing the Market Meltdown http://www.newsweek.com/id/137501 (May 2008)

“The song of the wind singer will set you free.”

William Nicholson (1948) British screenwriter, playwright and novelist

Source: The "Wind on Fire" Trilogy (2000-2003), The Wind Singer (Book 1), p. 77

“As soon
Seek roses in December, ice in June;
Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaff;
Believe a woman or an epitaph,
Or any other thing that's false, before
You trust in critics, who themselves are sore.”

George Gordon Byron English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

Source: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Line 75.

Hope, Falseness

“And in the ghostly palm-trees the sleepy tune
Of the quiet voice calling me, the long low croon
Of the steady Trade Winds blowing.”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

Salt-Water Ballads (1902), "Trade Winds"

Tree

“But if the envious nymphs shall fear
Their beauties will be scorn'd,
And hire the ruder winds to tear
That face which you adorn'd;

Then rage and foam amain, that we
Their malice may despise;
And from your froth we soon shall see
A second Venus rise.”

Thomas Carew (1594–1640) English poet

"On Sight Of A Gentlewoman's Face In The Water".
Carew's Poems

Fear, Beauty, Tear, Rage

“Graves: “…Tigers with the souls of sheep and heads full of wind…” A CLEVER METAPHOR…NO WONDER THE “PROTOCOLS” COPIES IT!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.81

Soul

“I see them on their winding way,
About their ranks the moonbeams play.”

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) English clergyman

"Lines written to a March".
need further publication dates

Way

“Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.”

Sir Robert Hutchison, 1st Baronet

Address to the British Medical Association, Winnipeg, Canada (1930); as quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations by Peter McDonald (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 51 https://books.google.it/books?id=MuTnCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA51.

“Far out at sea,—the sun was high,
While veer'd the wind and flapped the sail,
We saw a snow-white butterfly
Dancing before the fitful gale,
Far out at sea.”

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

Genius; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 88.

Sun, Dance, Sea

Quotes about wind page 8

Quotes about wind
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