Swans quotes
144 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."
"Those who awaken never rest in one place. Like swans, they rise and leave the lake. On the air they rise and fly an invisible course. Their food is knowledge. They live on emptiness. They have seen how to break free. Who can follow them?"
"The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare."
"The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure."
"You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside swans — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister."
"Remember that you are a Black Swan."
"My duchess,” James stated, his eyes sweeping the crowd with the air of a man who has ruled the waves. “She is not a swan, because that would imply she had once been an ugly duckling."
"Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan's black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood."
"Who may be called a paramahamsa? He who, like a swan, can take the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water. He who, like an ant, can take the sugar from a mixture of sugar and sand, leaving aside the sand."
"They were doing the Dying Swan at the ballet. And there was a rumor that some bookmarkers had drifted into town from upstate New York and that they had fixed the bullet. There was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
"I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation's almost the same. I'm kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan."
"Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan."
"I will make thee think thy swan a crow."
"The raven once in snowy plumes was drest, White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast, Fair as the guardian of the Capitol, Soft as the swan; a large and lovely fowl His tongue, his prating tongue had changed him quite To sooty blackness from the purest white."
"The recollected go forth to lives of renunciation. They take no pleasure in a fixed abode. Like wild swans abandoning a pool, they leave one resting place after another."
"Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree. I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans."
"White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky."
"Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus."
"I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind."
"What else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? If I were a nightingale, I would do the nightingale's part; if I were a swan, I would do as a swan. But now I am a rational creature, and I ought to praise God. This is my work. I do it, nor will I desert my post, so long as I am allowed to keep it. And I ask you to join me in this same song."
"In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term."
"The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow."
"If I was a nightingale I would sing like a nightingale; if a swan, like a swan. But since I am a rational creature my role is to praise God."
"The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death."
