Air Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

He that can swim needs not despair to fly; to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborne by the air if you can renew any impulse upon it faster than the air can recede from the pressure...

I know that you don't believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited — though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air — of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

Florence Nightingale

For now sits Expectation in the air
And hides a sword from hilts unto the point
With crowns imperial, crowns and coronets,
Promised to Harry and his followers.

William Shakespeare

the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy.

I listen to a jazz band at the Casino de Paris: high in the air, in a kind of cage, the Negroes writhe, dandle, toss lumps of raw meat to the crowd in the form of trumpet screams, rattles, drumbeats. The dance tune, broken, punched, counterpointed rises now and again to the surface.

All views are only probable, and a doctrine of probability which is not bound to a truth dissolves into thin air. In order to describe the probable, you must have a firm hold on the true. Therefore, before there can by any truth whatsoever, there must be absolute truth.

Jean-Paul Sartre

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The ocean...like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind.

Thomas Jefferson

The sky was of the deepest blue, with a few white, fleecy clouds drifting lazily across it, and the air was filled with the low drone of insects or with a sudden sharper note as bee or bluefly shot past with its quivering, long-drawn hum, like an insect tuning-fork.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Did I miss?" you asked. "You didn't exactly miss," said Pooh, "But you missed the balloon." "I'm so sorry," you said, and you fired again, and this time you hit the balloon and the air came slowly out, and Winnie-the-Pooh floated down to the ground.

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?—it is the same the angels breathe.

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, Oh! Life is so hard! and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

All the rays which convey the images of objects through the air are straight lines. Hence, if the images of very large bodies have to pass through very small holes, and beyond these holes recover their large size, the lines must necessarily intersect.

Leonardo da Vinci

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materialswhich they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The function which the wing performs against the air when the air is motionless is the same as that of the air moved against the wings when these are without motion.

Leonardo da Vinci

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes.

William Shakespeare

This new phenomena [atomic energy] would also lead to the construction of bombs.... A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

Albert Einstein

Of course—I prayed—
And did God care?
He cared as much as on the air
A bird—had stamped her foot
And cried, Give me.

Emily Dickinson

Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.

George Bernard Shaw

I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.

Jean-Paul Sartre

There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter.