Musings Quotes

• It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

  Charles Dickens

  Country, Nature, Easy

  Charles Dickens (1868). “Little Dorrit”, p.178, Kartindo.com

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

  Walter Bagehot

  Meditation And Yoga, Long, Calming

  Richard Holt Hutton, Walter Bagehot (1860). “The National Review”, p.234

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

  Anne Frank

  Years, Thirteen, Seems

  Anne Frank (2011). “The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition”, p.11, Bantam

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Reading, Great Work, States

  "The literary character". Book by Isaac D'Israeli (Chapter XII, last lines), 1795.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time.

  Victor Hugo

  Way, Leisure, Philosopher

  Victor Hugo (1862). “Marius”, p.9

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fiction is love and hate and agreement and conflict and common adventure, not lonely musings on have-beens and might-have-beens.

  Alfred Bertram Guthrie

  Lonely, Hate, Adventure

  Alfred Bertram Guthrie (1993). “The Blue Hen's Chick: An Autobiography”, p.177, U of Nebraska Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The sun shall shine in ages yet to be, The musing moon illumine pastures dim, And afterwards a new nativity For all who slept the dreamless interim.

  Nathalia Crane

  Moon, Shining, Age

  Nathalia Crane (1925). “The Janitor's Boy and Other Poems”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Autumn is the Sabbath of the year; the time to think of all the past: nature's calm twilight before the darkness. It does make all men think at times; even the lightest and the worst. The distant days of our springtime, our faded summer, comes over us like a dream. We sit in the evening of our life in tender musings, and all that has been takes shadowy form again, and passes through the thoughts.

  Cunningham Geikie

  Summer, Dream, Twilight

  8 Copy quote

• To rove about, musing, that is to say loitering, is, for a philosopher, a good way of spending time, especially in that kind of mock rurality, ugly but odd, and partaking of two natures, which surrounds certain large cities, particularly Paris.

  Victor Hugo

  Cities, Two, Paris

  Victor Hugo (1862). “Marius”, p.9

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• It has been a long time since I believed in Reality. I prefer the loveliness and the terror of my subjective experiences to those coldly scientific explanations which in the long run turn out to be no more real, and far less fun, than my own fantasies and musings.

  Sheldon B. Kopp

  Running, Fun, Real

  Sheldon B. Kopp (1985). “Even a Stone Can be a Teacher: Learning and Growing from the Experiences of Everyday Life”, Tarcher

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• And when night, guiding her bright train of stars, Throws o'er the sleeping world her gloomy veil, Lonely amidst the desert and the darkness, Musing upon the night's calm majesty; Wrapt up in quietness, with shade and silence, My soul more closely worshippeth Thy presence; With an internal day I feel enlighten'd, And hear a voice, which biddeth me to hope.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Lonely, Stars, Sleep

  Alphonse de Lamartine (1849). “A biographical sketch: the poetical meditations : and, poetical and religious harmonies”, p.18

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of images before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed.

  William Wordsworth

  Sadness, Men, Solitude

  1814 'The Excursion', preface, l.1-5.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• You know, albums are a funny thing. They're not like an intellectual decision. It's a collection of your kind of musings.

  Glen Hansard

  Funny Things, Decision, Intellectual

  "Singer-songwriter Glen Hansard". "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. June 18, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Regarding] the soul, I'm a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.

  Neal Stephenson

  Space, Expectations, Interesting

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Real hope is much more than wishful musing. It stiffens, not slackens, the spiritual spine.

  Neal A. Maxwell

  Spiritual, Real, Spine

  Neal A. Maxwell (1999). “One More Strain of Praise”, Deseret Book Company

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

  Deborah Tannen

  Morning, Character, Men

  11 Copy quote

• Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profit others and ourselves

  Anne Baxter

  Home, Temptation, Devil

  10 Copy quote

• The Z’s will kill us all, and then the Z’s will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline’s wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes’s musings, or Michelangelo’s sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

  John Green

  War, Silly, Wine

  4 Copy quote

• Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space — for wilderness and public space — must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Fighting, Space, Imagination

  10 Copy quote

• All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.

  Jandy Nelson

  Thinking, Expression, Secret

  Jandy Nelson (2010). “The Sky Is Everywhere”, p.101, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let the sky rain potatoes," said a musing voice. "Let it thunder to the tune of Greensleeves.

  Cassandra Clare

  Rain, Sky, Voice

  Cassandra Clare (2014). “Clockwork Princess”, p.519, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The thorn tree just began to bud
  And greening stained the sheltering hedge,
  An many a violet beside the wood
  Peeped blue between the withered sedge;
  The sun gleamed warm the bank beside,
  'Twas pleasant wandering out a while
  Neath nestling bush to lonely hide,
  Or bend a musings o'er a stile.

  John Clare

  Lonely, Spring, Blue

  John Clare (2012). “Careless Rambles by John Clare: A Selection of His Poems Chosen and Illustrated by Tom Pohrt”, p.71, Counterpoint Press

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius, throwing the reader of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into the very ideal presence whence these works have really originated. A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Book, Design, Secret

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 226, Literary Character, Chapter XII. Last lines, 1922.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• What Is Meditation? It is not musing, not daydreaming; but as ye find you bodies made up of the physical, mental and spiritual, it is the attuning of the mental body and the physical body to its spiritual source.

  Edgar Cayce

  Spiritual, Meditation, Body

  Edgar Cayce (1987). “Face to Face: 12 Edgar Cayce Readings Interpreted for Today”, A.R.E. Press (Association of Research & Enlightenment)

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• Snoopy (musing on his rooftop): Good Grief! Is it November already? My life is going by too fast. I think someone pushed the "Fast Forward" button.

  Charles M. Schulz

  Life, Grief, Thinking

  14 Copy quote