Top 20 Quotes About White Swans
#1. 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
#2. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#3. 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
#4. As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.
Dodie Smith
#5. Others quite new when covered with ice, all white, all throbbing, are like swans about to fly, but the earth has already caught them from below. They twist and tear themselves from the mud, only to be flattened out a little further on.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#6. 1 + 1 = 2 is simply an induction from experience. It is in no way logically or arithmetically 'necessary'. It is induced knowledge, on a par with 'All swans are white'.
Paul Strathern
#7. I think you're cute when the power goes to your head.
Gini Koch
#8. Swans in the winter air
A white perfection have
W. H. Auden
#9. The raven once in snowy plumes was drest,
White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast,
Fair as the guardian of the Capitol,
Soft as the swan; a large and lovely fowl
His tongue, his prating tongue had changed him quite
To sooty blackness from the purest white.
Ovid
#10. And besides, in the end, perhaps love demands marble palaces, white peacocks and swans.
Irene Nemirovsky
#11. She could say 'no' quicker than any woman I ever knew, and none of them ever meant 'yes'.
Jack Black
#12. 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
#13. Children are so creative and imaginative that they just bring you to life all over again.
Moira Kelly
#14. Thinking remembering how his uncle had said that all man had was time, all that stood between him and the death he feared and abhorred was time yet he spent half of it inventing ways of getting the other half past:
William Faulkner
#16. Athenians are addicted to innovation. They are daring beyond their judgment they toil on with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged in getting, they were born into the world to take no rest themselves, and to give none to others.
Thucydides
#17. He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.
Patrick DeWitt
#19. 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
#20. 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
