Summer quotes

Summer

2.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

2.5K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside summer — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Summer quotes (page 36 of 126)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Henry Adams Historian
Summer

"From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine...So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express! I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain, running in the face of it."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"I think of no news to tell you. It is a serene summer day here, all above the snow. The hens steal their nests, and I steal theireggs still, as formerly. This is what I do with the hands. Ah, labor,--it is a divine institution, and conversation with many men and hens."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"What a contrast between the stern and desolate poetry of Ossian, and that of Chaucer, and even of Shakespeare and Milton, much more of Dryden, and Pope, and Gray! Our summer of English poetry, like the Greek and Latin before it, seems well advanced towards its fall, and laden with the fruit and foliage of the season, with bright autumnal tints, but soon the winter will scatter its myriad clustering and shading leaves, and leave only a few desolate and fibrous boughs to sustain the snow and rime, and creak in the blasts of age."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by thehuman voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concretic layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth...to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!...Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn...Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"Removing the weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass, - this was my daily work."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water isbeing warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"It enhances our sense of the grand security and serenity of nature to observe the still undisturbed economy and content of the fishes of this century, their happiness a regular fruit of the summer."

Read quote 3 likes
Henry David Thoreau Writer, Philosopher
Summer

"Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature's laws are more immutable than any despot's, yet to man's daily life they rarelyseem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do."

Read quote 3 likes
Frida Giannini Fashion Designer
Summer

"The idea of 'ferie,' or summer break, is a long tradition of which all Italians, including myself, participate. It's a time to relax, reflect and recharge."

Read quote 3 likes