Live in each season
as it passes;
breathe the air,
drink the drink,
taste the fruit,
and resign yourself
to the influences of each.
-Henry David Thoreau
To stay in one place
and watch the seasons come and go
is tantamount to constant travel:
one is traveling with the earth.
-Marguerite Yourcenar
There is no season
such delight can bring
as summer, autumn,
winter and the spring.
-William Browne
The seasons are
what a symphony
ought to be:
four perfect movements
in harmony with each other.
-Arthur Rubenstein
Winter is an etching,
spring a water color,
summer an oil painting
and autumn
a mosaic of them all.
-Stanley Horowitz
Spring has its hundred flowers,
Autumn its moon.
Summer has
its cooling breezes,
Winter its snow.
If you allow no idle concerns
To weigh on your heart,
Your whole life will be one
Perennial good season.
-Wu-men
When winter is upon the land,there is nothing for the seed to do but wait.
When spring appears,
there is nothing for the bud to do but blossom.
When summer unfolds,
there is nothing for the fruit to do but ripen.
And when autumn comes,
there is nothing for the fruit to do but fall.
-Ann Mortifee
Winter draws
what summer paints.
-Elizabeth Bibesco
I prefer winter and fall,
when you feel the bone structure
of the landscape -
the loneliness of it,
the dead feeling of winter.
Something waits beneath it,
the whole story doesn't show.
-Andrew Wyeth
Spring passes
and one remembers innocence.
Summer passes
and one remembers exuberance.
Autumn passes
and one remembers reverence.
Winter passes
and one remembers perseverance.
-Yoko Ono
I like spring, but it is too young.
I like summer, but it is too proud.
So I like best of all autumn,
because its leaves are a little yellow,
its tone mellower, its colours richer,
and it is tinged a little with sorrow
and a premonition of death.
Its golden richness speaks
not of the innocence of spring,
nor of the power of summer,
but of the mellowness
and kindly wisdom of approaching age.
It knows the limitations of life and is content.
-Lin Yutang
In spring, summer and fall
people sort of have an open season
on each other;
only in the winter, in the country,
can you have longer quiet stretches
when you can savor
belonging to yourself.
-Ruth Stout
Spring beckons!
-Ambrose Bierce
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period -
When March is scarcely here
-Emily Dickinson
It was one of those March days
when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:
when it is summer in the light,
and winter in the shade.
-Charles Dickens
The first day of spring is one thing
and the first spring day is another.
-Henry Van Dyke
How imperceptibly
the first springing takes place.
-Henry David Thoreau
Winter's done,
and April's in the skies,
Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!
-Charles G. D. Roberts
April prepares her green traffic light
and the world thinks Go.
-Christopher Morley
I stuck my head out the window this morning
and spring kissed me bang in the face.
-Langston Hughes
Spring is when life's alive in everything.
-Christina Rossetti
April has put in the spirit of youth
in everything.
-William Shakespeare
April is a promise
that May is bound to keep.
-Hal Borland
The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.
-Edwin May Teale
Springtime is at hand.
When will you ever bloom,
if not here and now?
-Angelus Silesius
Blossom by blossom
the Spring begins.
-Algernon Swinburne
Spring still makes spring
in my mind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
What potent blood has modest May.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spring in the world!
And all things are made new!
-Richard Hovey
Spring: an experience in immortality
-Henry David Thoreau
Spring opens
a hundred flowers -
for whom?
-A Zen Garden
This outward spring and garden
are a reflection of the inward garden.
-Djalal ad-Din Rumi
I have embraced the summer dawn.
-Arthur Rimbaud
Summer - summer - summer!
The soundless footsteps on the grass.
-John Galsworthy
I wonder what it would be like
to live in a world where it was always June.
-Lucy Maude Montgomery
In summer,
the song sings itself.
-William Carlos Williams
In a summer season
when soft was the sun.
-William Langland
Summer afternoon - summer afternoon;
to me those have always been
the two most beautiful words in the English language.
-Henry James
Sweet roses in this summer air.
-William Shakespeare
Summertime
and the livin' is easy.
-Ira Gershwin
Wide is the carpet of summer.
-Arabic Proverb
I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower,
as if it were to be the last one for me.
-Andre Gide
Summer has filled her veins with light
and her heart is washed with noon.
-Cecil Day-Lewis
...summer, the
"creative deluge of light and heat."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man in summer
is man intensated.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
August creates as she slumbers
replete and satisfied.
-Joseph Wood Krutch
The Long Hot Summer
-William Faulkner
Deep summer
is when laziness finds respectability.
-Sam Keen
A red sun
Falls into the sea:
What summer heat!
-Natsume Soseki
The summer night
is like a perfection of thought.
-Wallace Stevens
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
-William Shakespeare
We have had our summer evenings
-Humbert Wolfe
August rain:
the best of the summer is gone,
and the new fall not yet born.
The odd uneven time.
-Sylvia Plath
The Indian Summer,
the dead Summer's soul.
-Mary Clemmer
Life starts all over again
when it gets crisp in the fall.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summer passes into autumn
in some unimaginable point in time,
like the turning of a leaf.
-Henry David Thoreau
Autumn is a second spring
when every leaf's a flower.
-Albert Camus
Autumn's the mellow time.
-William Allingham
Why is summer mist romantic
and autumn mist just sad?
-Dodie Smith
Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.
-John Keats
It's autumn in the country I remember.
-Trumbull Stickney
Autumn,
the year's last, loveliest smile.
-William Cullen Bryant
Delicious autumn!
My very soul is wedded to it.
-George Eliot
The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die
are the world's oldest performance art,
and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah
before the black and white silence of winter.
-Shauna Niequist
Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
fluttering from the autumn tree.
-Emily Bronte
All those golden autumn daysthe sky was full of wings.-Laura Ingles Wilder
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine
by staying in the house.
So I spend almost all the daylight hours
in the open air.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is a harmony in autumn,and a lustre in its sky.-Percy Bysshe Shelley
How beautiful the leaves grow old.
How full of light and color are their last days.
-John Burroughs
The dry scent of a dying garden
in September-Theodore Roethke
- maybe a Thursday,
like today, in autumn.
-Cesar Vallejo
Best is autumn.
It is mature, reasonable and serious.
-Valentin
Cheerful and yet profound,like an October afternoon.-Friedrich Nietzsche
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
-Ezra Pound
Swinging on delicate hingesthe Autumn LeafAlmost all the stem.-Jack Kerouac
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Maple leaf falling down,
showing front, showing back.
-Ryokan
One falling leaf is not just one leaf;
it means the whole autumn.
-D. T. Suzuki
Leaves fall
where no green earth remains.
-Jia Dao
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal
to sympathy for its decay.
-Robert Browning
The heavy leaf
Falls of its own will
On this silent windless day.
-Boncho
Now is the time
for the burning of the leaves.
-Laurence Binyon
October is the fallen leaf,
but it is also a wider horizon more clearly seen.
-Hal Borland
The summer fades and passes and October comes.
We smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness,
a thrill of nervousness, a swift elation,
a sense of sadness and departure.
-Thomas Wolfe
A wind has blown the rain away
and blown the sky away
and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.
I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
-e e cummings
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence.
-Thomas Hood
In autumn,
mountains loom and water runs clear.
-Ryokan
An autumn night ...don't think your life didn't matter.-Basho
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
-Gwendolyn Brooks
Welcome again the darkness of winter,
You familiar soothing dusk.
-Juhani Aho
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
-Emily Dickinson
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
-Wallace Stevens
Snow fallen on snow,
and this evening, the full moon
of November.
-Basho
A winter's day in a deep and dark December - I am alone, gazing from my window to the street below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
-Simon and Garfunkel
It is like any other snow,
but from a different window,
and there lies the singular charm of it.
-Sylvia Plath
In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.
-Christina Rossetti
Winter solitude -
in a world of one color
the sound of the wind.
-Basho
Snow has made everything earthly clear and quiet.
My mind is simple and patient.
-Tuomas Anhava
Black evening, white snow.-Alexander Blok
I please myself with the graces
of the winter scenery.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow
-Wallace Stevens
Every mile is two in winter.
-George Herbert
little
and still as ice
a January flame
-John Sandbach
Winter solitude -
in a world of one color
the sound of the wind.
-Matsuo Basho
Blow, blow, thou winter wind!
-William Shakespeare
There seems to be
so much more winter than we need this year.
-Kathleen Norris
Winter is cold-hearted.
-Christina Rossetti
While I relish our warm months,
winter forms our character
and brings out our best.
-Tom Allen
Winter has made us a buoyant people -
a tough resilient breed,
able to adapt to the longest of our seasons,
to come to terms with it, to survive it -
yes, and to celebrate it.
-Pierre Berton
In the winter, warmth stands for all virtue.
-Henry David Thoreau
What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something,
then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.
-John Knowles
Aristophanes said merrily that in a certain city the cold was so intense
that words were congealed as soon as spoken,
but after some time thawed and became audible;
so that the words spoken in winter were articulated next summer.
-Plutarch
There is a wilder solitude in winter
When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
-May Sarton
There is still vitality under the winter snow,
even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.
-Agnes Sligh Turnbull
In the winter, the world gets sharp.
Beautiful things happen.
-Peter Fiore
Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter.
Who would think that those branches
would turn green again and blossom,
but we hope it, we know it.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let us love winter,
for it is the spring of genius.
-Pietro Aretino
In every winter's heart
there is a quivering spring.
-Kahlil Gibran
If we had no winter,
the spring would not be so pleasant.
-Anne Bradstreet
Barren winter
brings forth the fruitful spring
-The Oculatum
Winter does not leave
without a backward glance.
-Finnish Proverb
Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring
that it occasioned a great deal of talk.
-Bill Nye
Winter is on my head
but eternal spring
is in my heart.
-Victor Hugo