Wind Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason that the world gives. For not in that way does the soul of a philosopher reason.... Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing.

The wind which passes through the skins of animals will make men leap up:—That is the bagpipes, which cause men to dance.

Leonardo da Vinci

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

I hung my verse in the wind
Time and tide their faults will find.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!

Rudyard Kipling

Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. what else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing.

He that has a little tiny wit,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare

The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven and earth should talk with him. But that is not our science.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth's] flatness is responsible for it staying still: for it does not cut the air beneath but covers it like a lid, which flat bodies evidently do: for they are hard to move even for the winds, on account of their resistance.

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you can call him a man?…
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Charles Dickens

The creative action is not voluntary at all, but automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He call'd them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

William Shakespeare

Spring still makes spring in the mind
When sixty years are told:
Love wakes anew this throbbing heart,
And we are never old
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow
And through the wind-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

The word unto the prophet spoken Was writ on tablets yet unbroken: The word by seers or sibyls told, In groves of oak or fanes of gold, Still floats upon the morning wind, Still whispers to the willing mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.

William Shakespeare

Now that is the wisdom of a man, in every instance of his labor, to hitch his wagon to a star, and see his chore done by the gods themselves. That is the way we are strong, by borrowing the might of the elements. The forces of steam, gravity, galvanism, light, magnets, wind, fire, serve us day by day and cost us nothing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.

Søren Kierkegaard

The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and it opened no more.

Charles Dickens

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.

My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.

Charles Dickens

And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand.

William Faulkner

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen, You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun. And the trees in the Shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten, And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

Rudyard Kipling