Lakes quotes
749 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside lakes — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"If you have never taken the train across Canada, you really should put it on your life list... Meanwhile, I get to sit back and watch for moose from the dome car as we roll through the lake-dotted vastness of the boreal forest."
"Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud."
"Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?"
"In the mountain, stillness surges up to explore its own height In the lake, movement stands still to contemplate its own depth."
"To be great, be whole; Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you. Be whole in everything. Put all you are Into the smallest thing you do. So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor Because it blooms up above."
"Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It's like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up alive. Things will go where they're supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course."
"When you write the story of two happy lovers, let the story be set on the banks of Lake Como."
"The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be."
"This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty."
"Every wave is a water sprite who swims in the current, each current is a path which snakes towards my palace, and my palace is fluidly built at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of earth, fire and water."
"I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree."
"A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable."
"One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years."
"Oh how will crime engender crime! throw guilt Upon the soul, and like a stone cast on The troubled waters of a lake, 'Twill form in circles round succeeding round; Each wider than the first."
"The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, andagain, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him."
"As we lay huddled together under the tent, which leaked considerably about the sides, with our baggage at our feet, we listened to some of the grandest thunder which I ever heard, -rapid peals, round and plump, bang, bang, bang in succession, like artillery from some fortress in the sky; and the lightning was proportionally brilliant. The Indian said, 'It must be good powder.' All for the benefit of the moose and us, echoing far over the concealed lakes."
"Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls."
"Water its living strength first shows, When obstacles its course oppose."
"I have other fish to fry."
"We are America's Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup."
