Wind (original) (raw)

Wind, while simply "the flow of air or other gases that compose an atmosphere (including that of the planet Earth)," has since ancient times been a significant and pervasive metaphor and symbol in human discourse.

I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it— but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, (1858)

You too, ye winds! that now begin to blow
With boisterous sweep, I raise my voice to you.
Where are your stores, ye viewless beings! say,
Where your aerial magazines reserv’d,
Against the day of tempest perilous?
In what untravel'd country of the air,
Hush'd in still silence, sleep you, when 'tis calm?

—James Thomson,
The Seasons, Winter, (1726)

Come as the winds come, when
Forests are rended,
Come as the waves come, when
Navies are stranded.

—Walter Scott,
Pibroch of Donald Dhu, St. 4 (1816)

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau.
Mock on, mock on—'tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

—William Blake,
Poems from Blake's Notebook, (c. 1804), "Mock On", st. 1

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.

—Omar Khayyam,
The Rubaiyat, XXVII

A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. "The ancient Greeks," I say, "who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?"

—Robert M. Pirsig,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (1974)

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail.

—John Muir,
Our National Parks, (1901)

ਬੋਲੈ ਪਉਣੁ ॥ ਬੁਝੁ ਰੇ ਗਿਆਨੀ ਮੂਆ ਹੈ ਕਉਣੁ ॥
The body is dust; the wind speaks through it. Understand, O wise one, who has died.
—Guru Granth Sahib, "On Death"

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
My Lost Youth, (1858), refrain

The night was not very dark; there was a full moon, across which large clouds were driving before the wind. This produced alternations of light and shade, out-of-doors eclipses and illuminations, and in-doors a kind of twilight. This twilight, enough to enable him to find his way, changing with the passing clouds, resembled that sort of livid light which falls through the window of a dungeon before which men are passing.

—Victor Hugo,
Les Misérables, (1862),
Book II—The Fall, "Chapter X—The Man Awakes,"
trans. Charles Wilbour, (1862 - 1863)

"Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night," he had said. "You must not try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses."

—Sherwood Anderson,
Winesburg, Ohio, (1919), "Death"

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger — one of the waxen wings of flight.

—Charles Lindbergh,
Reader's Digest (November 1939),
"Aviation, Geography, and Race," pp. 64-67

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
The Indian Serenade, (1819), st. 1

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
—Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
(1776), v. 1, ch. 68.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass --
I the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.
—Henry David Thoreau,
Walden, (1854), "Chapter 8—The Village"

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

[edit]

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 872-74.

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