Air Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

George Bernard Shaw

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon's roar —
The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Trapped in the blood, athirst for air,
Christ, who once was employed as single Son of God
Now finds Himself among three billion on a billion
Brother sons, their arms thrown wide to grasp and hold
and walk them everywhere
Now weaving this, now weaving that in swoons…

The air which is struck with most swiftness by the movable thing is compressed to the greatest degree in itself.

Leonardo da Vinci

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

Promising is the very air o' th' time; it opens the eyes of expectation. Performance is ever duller for his act; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable; performance is a kind of will or testament which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it.

William Shakespeare

Do not several sorts of Rays make Vibrations of several bignesses, which according to their bigness excite Sensations of several Colours, much after the manner that the Vibrations of the Air, according to their several bignesses excite Sensations of several Sounds? And particularly do not the most refrangible Rays excite the shortest Vibrations for making a Sensation of deep violet, the least refrangible the largest form making a Sensation of deep red, and several intermediate sorts of Rays, Vibrations of several intermediate bignesses to make Sensations of several intemediate Colours?

A voyage to the moon, however romantick and absurd the scheme may now appear, since the properties of air have been better understood, seemed highly probable to many of the aspiring wits in the last century

Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money — or because the heart aches. L'amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?

Agatha Christie

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
Drink the wild air's salubrity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The properties of the air are such that it may become condensed or rarefied.

Leonardo da Vinci

Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

A ship is worse than a gaol. There is, in a gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of of being in danger.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in man
That wastes and withers there;
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate
And the Warder is Despair.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.

Charles Dickens

The light was faint, and soft the air
That breathed around the place;
And she was lithe, and tall, and fair,
And with a wayward grace
Her queenly head she bare.

But Aetna hard at hand With hideous ruin thunders, and anon Shoots a dark cloud to heaven or whirling smoke Pitch-black, with glowing ashes, and aloft Heaves balls of fire, and licks the stars, anon Rocks and the uptorn entrails of the hill Spews forth, and heaps the molten stones in air Booming, and from his lowest depth upboils.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

How fearful
And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles; half-way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice.

William Shakespeare

We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. Well, said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, It's a hell of a place. A description which was photographic for exactness.

Health is the first muse, comprising the magical benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A balloon goes up quite easily for a certain distance, but after a certain distance it refuses to go up any further, because the air is too rarefied to float it and sustain it. And, therefore, I would say, let us examine the concrete facts.

Winston Churchill

My faith in the reliability of the theory still fluctuates... Thus, if not all systems of equations of the theory... admit transformations other than linear ones, then the theory contradicts its own starting point and all is up in the air.

Albert Einstein