Airy Quotes - Page 2

• The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth,
  From earth to heaven.

  William Shakespeare

  Eye, Heaven, Rolling

  'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-6) act 5, sc. 1, l. 7

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• On Sept 15th [1852] Mr Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked my opinion on the utility of Mr Babbage's calculating machine, and the propriety of spending further sums of money on it. I replied, entering fully into the matter, and giving my opinion that it was worthless.

  George Biddell Airy

  Giving, Machines, Entering

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• Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath, The clamtrous lapwings feel the leaden death; Oft, as the mounting larks their notes prepare They fall, and leave their little lives in air.

  Alexander Pope

  Life, Death, Fall

  Alexander Pope, “Windsor Forest”

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• Defend me, therefore, common sense, say
  From reveries so airy, from the toil
  Of dropping buckets into empty wells,
  And growing old in drawing nothing up.

  William Cowper

  Drawing, Common Sense, Toil

  'The Task' (1785) bk. 3 'The Garden' l. 187

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• When once a man has made celebrity necessary to his happiness, he has put it in the power of the weakest and most timorous malignity, if not to take away his satisfaction, at least to withhold it. His enemies may indulge their pride by airy negligence and gratify their malice by quiet neutrality.

  Samuel Johnson

  Happiness, Pride, Power

  Samuel Johnson (1827). “The Rambler”, p.224

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• One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

  Robert Bly

  Religious, Writing, Character

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• There was a blithe certainty that came from first comprehending the full Einstein field equations, arabesques of Greek letters clinging tenuously to the page, a gossamer web. They seemed insubstantial when you first saw them, a string of squiggles. Yet to follow the delicate tensors as they contracted, as the superscripts paired with subscripts, collapsing mathematically into concrete classical entities - potential; mass; forces vectoring in a curved geometry - that was a sublime experience. The iron fist of the real, inside the velvet glove of airy mathematics.

  Gregory Benford

  Real, Math, Iron

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• Bonnie who had never hurt a - a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie who was like a kitten making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie with her hair that was called something strawberry but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes big and brown under lashes like stars...

  L. J. Smith

  Hurt, Stars, Taken

  L J Smith (2010). “Nightfall”, p.100, Hachette UK

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• The first Care in building of Cities, is to make them airy and well perflated; infectious Distempers must necessarily be propagated amongst Mankind living close together.

  John Arbuthnot

  Cities, Together, Care

  An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies Ch. 9, No. 20

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• But housekeeping is fun. It is one job where you enjoy the results right along as you work. You may work all day washing and ironing, but at night you have the delicious feeling of sunny clean sheets and airy pillows to lie on. If you clean, you sit down at nightfall with the house shining and faintly smelling of wax, all yours to enjoy right then and there. And if you cook—that creation you lift from the oven goes right to the table.

  Gladys Taber

  Jobs, Fun, Lying

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• It's the idea that when you say 'actress', people think of an airy, floaty, no-brain person, which of course you can't be if you are an actor. It is an unfortunate word, which is why, for a time, I hung on to 'actor', because it just seemed more workmanlike, you know, like you say 'woman doctor' not 'doctoress'.

  Miranda Richardson

  Thinking, Doctors, Ideas

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• Imagination helps you to recognize the reality of facts, but then to go beyond them, to penetrate beneath them, to rise above them in your search for creative answers to problems. Imagination "stirs up the gift of God in thee." Through your imagination you touch and express the inspiration of the Infinite. Imagination, in the words of Shakespeare, "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." You reach into the heavens to grasp an idea, then you bring it down to earth and make it work.

  Wilferd Peterson

  Art, Inspiration, Reality

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• The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.

  Isak Dinesen

  Summer, Dream, Morning

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Winter's Tales”, p.37, Vintage

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• Aristotle's opinion... that comets were nothing else than sublunary vapors or airy meteors... prevailed so far amongst the Greeks, that this sublimest part of astronomy lay altogether neglected; since none could think it worthwhile to observe, and to give an account of the wandering and uncertain paths of vapours floating in the Ether.

  Edmond Halley

  Thinking, Giving, Greek

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• Ambition is a meteor-gleam; Fame a restless airy dream; Pleasures, insects on the wing Round Peace, th' tend rest flow'r of spring.

  Robert Burns

  Dream, Spring, Ambition

  Robert Burns (1901). “The Poetry of Robert Burns: Posthumous pieces”

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• Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Men, Thinking, Sorrow

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• Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labor, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.

  Thomas Paine

  Children, Mean, Years

  Thomas Paine (1830). “Brief sketch of the life of Thomas Paine. Common sense. Epistle to Quakers. The crisis. Public good. Letter to the Abbe Raynal. Dissertations on government, the affairs of the bank, and paper money. Miscellaneous”, p.404

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• Sweetest Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv'st unseen Within thy airy shell, By slow Meander's margent green, And in the violet-embroidered vale.

  John Milton

  Echoes, Nymphs, Unseen

  'Comus' (1637) l. 230

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• Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.

  William Shakespeare

  Dream, Ambition, Light

  William Shakespeare (2001). “Hamlet”, p.155, Classic Books Company

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• My garden, with its silence and pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at me wistfully through the bars.

  Alexander Smith

  Sweet, Nature, Garden

  Alexander Smith (2012). “Dreamthorp A Book of Essays Written in the Country”, p.223, tredition

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• We not only live among men, but there are airy hosts, blessed spectators, sympathetic lookers-on, that see and know and appreciate our thoughts and feelings and acts.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Inspirational, Blessed, Character

  Henry Ward Beecher (1866). “Royal truths”, p.4

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• The pursuit of exotic beauty in such a life would have been like having a ball of tinfoil in your stomach, all that airy metal filling you up with hunger.

  Laura Kasischke

  Balls, Exotic, Hunger

  Laura Kasischke (2014). “White Bird in a Blizzard”, p.63, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: 'I am not empty, I am open'.

  Tomas Transtromer

  Prayer, Wall, Taken

  Tomas Transtromer (2017). “The Half-Finished Heaven: Selected Poems”, p.126, Graywolf Press

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• And the day climbs down from its blue loft-bed on a slanting ladder of sunbeams, pauses a moment between the trees, airy-light, young.

  Hans Børli

  Light, Blue, Tree

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• We sit in calm, airy, silent rooms opening upon sunlit and embowered lawns, not a sound except of summer and of husbandry disturbs the peace; but seven million men, any ten thousand of whom could have annihilated the ancient armies, are in ceaseless battle from the Alps to the Ocean.

  Winston Churchill

  Summer, War, Ocean

  Sir Winston Churchill (1954). “Sir Winston Churchill: a self-portrait”

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