Wind Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.

In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain-I find no sea room-but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore.

Henry David Thoreau

If there were reason for these miseries, then into limits could I bind my woes. If the winds rages, doth not the sea wax mad, threat'ning the welkin with its big-swoll'n face? And wilt though have a reason for this coil? I am the sea. Hark how her sighs doth blow. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth.

William Shakespeare

The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears to hear it.

Henry David Thoreau

The soul can never be corrupted with the corruption of the body, but it is like the wind which causes the sound of the organ, and which ceases to produce a good effect when a pipe is spoilt.

Leonardo da Vinci

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.

Charles Dickens

Imperious Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

William Shakespeare

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

I held a jewel in my fingers And went to sleep. The day was warm, and winds were prosy; I said: "'T will keep." I woke and chid my honest fingers,— The gem was gone; And now an amethyst remembrance Is all I own.

Emily Dickinson

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

But it seems that the wind is setting East, and the withering of all Woods may be drawing near.

J. R. R. Tolkien

You know how often the turning down this street or that, the accepting or rejecting of an invitation, may deflect the whole current of our lives into some other channel. Are we mere leaves, fluttered hither and thither by the wind, or are we rather, with every conviction that we are free agents, carried steadily along to a definite and pre-determined end?

Arthur Conan Doyle

Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise.

I am but mad north-northwest: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

William Shakespeare

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one,
at the end of the path which I've only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—

and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a sign appears, echoing our own sign...
But what we sense is the falling winds.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro—
And what should they know of England who only England know?—
The poor little street-bred people that vapour and fume and brag.

Rudyard Kipling

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Under the Dred Scott decision, "squatter sovereignty" squatted out of existence, tumbled down like temporary scaffolding — like the mould at the foundry served through one blast and fell back into loose sand — helped to carry an election, and then was kicked to the winds.

Abraham Lincoln

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

William Shakespeare

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.

The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two, Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon Broke out of bounds o'er the ethereal blue, Splitting some planet with its beautiful tail, As boats are sometimes by a wanton whale.

When the fierce, burning winds blow over our lives-and we cannot prevent them-let us, too, accept the inevitable. And then get busy and pick up the pieces.