Top 100 Quotes About Swans
#1. I love the idea of species fluidity, I guess, the sense of the maiden inherent in the swan or seal, the youth inherent in the bear or deer. After all, human beings are animals.
Delia Sherman
#2. Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.
Epictetus
#3. I can't even listen to Swans anymore. It doesn't do it for me at all, but I absolutely adore the early records and, on that same token, I wouldn't in any way wish for them to come back and repeat themselves.
Justin Broadrick
#4. One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.
Kenneth Clark
#5. I don't think you're happier if you're thin or beautiful or rich or married. You have to make your own happiness. My heroines do not become beautiful elegant swans, they become confident ducks and get on with life.
Maeve Binchy
#6. 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.
Socrates
#7. Contact lenses are for vain, weak-willed piglets who swan around showing off: 'Look everybody, I can see without spectacles. No one at first glance will ever assume I know how to surf the net.'
Greg Proops
#8. PAVILIONS OF SUN
Swans do fly
High above you
All the time
Prince of Sun
From his pavilion
Makes you shine
Come, come, come into my garden, lady love
Maybe I can hold your gold hand
Glide within my gold grove, lady love
Know the earth and you'll understand
Marc Bolan
#9. Those parents who do not educate their sons are their enemies; for as is a crane among swans, so are ignorant so are ignorant sons in a public assembly.
Chanakya
#10. Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.
Michael Gira
#11. To ugly ducklings everywhere,
Don't worry about those fluffy yellow morons:
They'll never get to be swans
Zoe Marriott
#12. She saw, yet again, that her friend's compliments were just bits of art and artifice. They were paper swans, cunningly folded so that they could float on the air for a few moments. Nothing more.
Marie Rutkoski
#13. Do you really believe that in the late 1800s Paddy Hannan would have walked 600 miles in the hot sun from Perth to Kalgoorlie to discover gold if he had to pay the Wayne Swan resource super tax?
Clive Palmer
#14. The river is such a tranquil place, a place to sit and think of romance and the beauty of nature, to enjoy the elegance of swans and the chance of a glimpse of a kingfisher.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
#15. Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Matthew Arnold
#16. Nothing in all those "O swan" poems had ever mentioned that they hissed. Or resented being mistaken for felines. Or bit.
Connie Willis
#17. Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!
William Wordsworth
#18. The young swans as big as their parents now, but still grey and it looks peculiar, like two different species swimming in a line, alike in all their movements, and no doubt they think they are the same, while everyone can see that they are not.
Per Petterson
#19. Over your body the clouds go
High, high and icily
And a little flat, as if they
Floated on a glass that was invisible.
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you
You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky.
Sylvia Plath
#20. There is nothing in nature which approximates to the idea of a hospice.
Jim Crumley
#21. my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.
Thomas Harris
#24. Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke - my poor swomee swans, why they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat.
Dr. Seuss
#25. People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises - or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls 'Black Swans' - are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too
Martin Wolf
#26. Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a brazen stylus.
Joseph Joubert
#27. The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
Wallace Stevens
#29. The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below.
John Clare
#30. 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?
Gautama Buddha
#31. Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...
From the poem 'Only For You
Munia Khan
#32. If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.
C. JoyBell C.
#33. Millions of years ago, in my previous incarnations, I must have been related to swans ... because I can still feel that affinity.
Jean Sibelius
#34. The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling
even compelling
us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices!
Margaret Starbird
#35. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#37. And strangely enoughthe only emotion I ever feel, is what the beaver must feel, as he bears each stick to his hidden construction, which creates the tranquil pond and gives the mallards somewhere to paddle, and the pair of swans a place to conceal their young
Billy Collins
#38. The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.
Wilkie Collins
#39. Tonight I heard Louis's horn. My father heard it, too. The wind was right, and I could hear the notes of taps, just as darkness fell. There is nothing in all the world I like better than the trumpet of the swan.
E.B. White
#40. If you're looking for monogamy, you'd better marry a swan.
Nora Ephron
#41. I too am a poet who has found some favour with the Muse. I too have written songs. I too have heard the shepherds call me bard. But I take it from them with a grain of salt: I have the feeling that I cannot yet compare with Varius or Cinna, but cackle like a goose among melodious swans.
Virgil
#43. A rare bird upon the earth and very much like a black swan.
Juvenal
#45. The night folds her trembling hands over a weary world. Out of a pale blue rises the shining moon. My thoughts are flying to the stars like lonely swans.
Joseph Goebbels
#46. Constance Spry was one of the first people to put flowers in urns and ceramic swans and other unusual containers, but her arrangements tended to be a little less full.
Catherine Martin
#47. The swans of our childhood were probably just pigeons.'" He
Charlie Carillo
#48. I was too young that time to value her,
But now I know her. If she be a traitor,
Why, so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together,
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.
William Shakespeare
#49. I must remember about chandeliers and dancing, about swans and roses and snow.
Jean Rhys
#50. No matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.
Karl Popper
#52. The swan murmurs sweet strains with a flattering tongue, itself the singer of its own dirge.
Martial
#53. I dream that one day I would be a published writer and people would read my books - if not, I would be living in the mountains in a small hut, near a pond where swans swim, writing a diary for myself.
Srinidhi.R
#55. I always believed I was an ugly duckling in a family of swans, you know? I was such a black sheep, and it was the same way in high school ... I was just kind of that awkward theater kid with a bunch of athletes ... it was very 'Glee.'
Lindsay Pearce
#57. In Virginia... all geese are swans.
John Adams
#58. Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.
Quentin Crisp
#59. The wild swan's death-hymn took the soul Of that waste place with joy Hidden in sorrow: at first to the ear The warble was low, and full and clear.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#60. I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
Charles Baudelaire
#61. FRANK: Do you know Yeats?
RITA: The wine lodge?
FRANK: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
RITA: No.
FRANK: Well, in his poem 'The Wild Swans At Coole',Yeats rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You see? That's an example of assonance.
RITA: Yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.
Willy Russell
#62. Women who start out as ugly ducklings don't become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.
Maeve Binchy
#63. I've actually rented Bjork's swan dress. I know that's kind of recycling, but I saw An Inconvenient Truth.
Rainn Wilson
#64. I thought acting was all about natural instinct but I've realised, through working with so many talented actors on 'Wild Swans' and 'Run,' that I can see the training. That's why I am back at drama school.
Katie Leung
#65. Ugly ducklings don't turn into swans and glide off down the lake. Whether your sunglasses are on or off, you only see the world you make.
Bonnie Raitt
#66. 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.
Epictetus
#67. And over the pond are sailing Two swans all white as snow; Sweet voices mysteriously wailing Pierce through me as onward they go. They sail along, and a ringing Sweet melody rises on high; And when the swans begin singing, They presently must die.
Heinrich Heine
#68. It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!
Hans Christian Andersen
#69. Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our water yet appear.
Ben Jonson
#70. I think Kristen is incredibly brave. She played such a good version Bella Swan, people think Kristen Stewart is Bella Swan. She's not, you know? If you meet Kristen, she's wildly kind of giggly and vivacious and rebellious and naughty - all things that Bella Swan isn't.
Rupert Sanders
#71. For beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne: The evening light on the foam, and the swans, there; That music, remote, forlorn.
Walter De La Mare
#72. Every lake belongs to the quietness desired by the swans.
Munia Khan
#73. The obituary writers drew their incomplete sketches, touring through his life like travelers to England who do not ever see swans, sheep, bicycles, and blue eyes.
Mark Helprin
#74. It is best to live with honor for just a day than with dishonor for many decades; better a short lived celestial swan than a century-lived crow.
Sathya Sai Baba
#75. If lilies would grow
backwards,
if roses would grow
backwards,
if all those roots
could see the stars
& the dead not close
their eyes,
we would become like swans.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#76. Gaze not on swans, in whose soft breast,
A full-hatched beauty seems to nest
Nor snow, which falling from the sky
Hovers in its virginity.
Henry Noel Brailsford
#78. Castles, in Nanny Ogg's experience, were like swans. They looked as if they were drifting regally through the waters of Time, but in fact there was a hell of a lot of activity going on underneath.
Terry Pratchett
#79. This ugly duckling investment will likely need time - quarters, or even years - to blossom into a beautiful swan.
Barry Ritholtz
#80. I once wrote a song so beautiful that I myself couldn't sing it. It's called Plastic Government Cheese Swan, and it's about how the world is plastic and full of government cheese swans.
Thom Yorke
#81. The dying swan, when years her temples pierce, In music-strains breathes out her life and verse, And, chanting her own dirge, tides on her wat'ry hearse.
Phineas Fletcher
#82. 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.
D.H. Lawrence
#83. 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.
Jung Chang
#84. 'Wild Swans' showed me there are Chinese traditions that still affect my life. For example, it's not that women are inferior, exactly, but my dad and my brother are the most important men in my life and I would do anything for them. I feel like I should be the one cooking and looking after them.
Katie Leung
#85. 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.
Woody Allen
#86. Swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.
Jan Struther
#87. No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it.
Karl Popper
#88. It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
Van Wyck Brooks
#89. Swans sing before they die - 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#90. I had me one sharp knife, a throwback to my glory days of the swans, and it's sharp as a nun on her second sherry.
Ken Bruen
#91. The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#92. The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
James Russell Lowell
#93. In general, positive Black Swans take time to show their effect while negative ones happen very quickly - it is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build. (During
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#94. I'm crazy about ducks and swans and geese, so I don't eat foie gras. I try to eat organic.
Anna Chancellor
#95. So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
Richard Thaler
#96. When I first started doing the quieter, more acoustic material in Swans, there was a lot of derision and outright hatred from the audience and press, just as in the early days of Swans when we were rejected outright because of the bludgeoning, single-minded violence of the music.
Michael Gira
#97. Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appear'd, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard: To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth, ask'd ages more.
William Cowper
#98. Ugly ducklings often turn into beautiful swans when they are tested.
Sudha Murty
#99. The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.
Maeve Binchy
