#Cycles Quotes

“Hither rolls the storm of heat;I feel its finer billows beatLike a sea which me infolds;Heat with viewless fingers moulds,Swells, and mellows, and matures,Paints, and flavors, and allures,Bird and brier inly warms,Still enriches and transforms,Gives the reed and lily length,Adds to oak and oxen strength,Transforming what it doth infold,Life out of death, new out of old.”

“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”

“Old & New put their stamp to everything in Nature. The snowflake that is now falling is marked by both. The present moment gives the motion & the color of the flake: Antiquity, its form & properties. All things wear a luster which is the gift of the present & a tarnish of time.”

“What potent blood hath modest May.”

“The end of being is to know; and if you say, the end of knowledge is action,-why, yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge.”

“In Winter the bare boughs that seem to sleep Work covertly, preparing for their Spring.”

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

“Out of sleeping a waking, Out of waking a sleep.”

“We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.”

“The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.”

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

“Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.”

“You get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.”

“Through winter-time we call on spring,And through the spring on summer call,And when the abounding hedges ringDeclare that winter's best of all:And after that there's nothing goodBecause the spring time has not come-Not know that what disturbs our bloodIs but its longing for the tomb.”

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of treesand changing leaves.”

“Nature is a rag merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations.”

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

“Course, that's the trouble with politics, it breeds politics! So that makes it pretty hard to stamp out.”

“An age is the reversal of an age:When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone,We lived like men that watch a painted stage.What matter for the scene, the scene once gone:It had not touched our lives.”

“All things fall and are built again,And those that build them again are gay.”

“A tree there is that from its topmost boughIs half all glittering flame and half all greenAbounding foliage moistened with the dew;And half is half and yet is all the scene;And half and half consume what they renew.”

“Smile O voluptuous coolbreathed earth!Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees!Earth of departed sunset! Earth of the mountains misty-topt!Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue!Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my sake!Far-swooping elbowed earth! Rich apple-blossomed earth!Smile, for your lover comes!”

“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd / And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, / I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

“The city sleeps and the country sleeps, the living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, the old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; and these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, and such as it is to be of these more or less I am, and of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

“Life is in short cycles or periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, prostrate; he will not lift his hand to save his life; he can never think more. He sinks into deep sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring adventure.”

“Long and long has the grass been growing,Long and long has the rain been falling,Long has the globe been rolling round.”

“There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle.”

“All manifest life seems to require a period of sleep, of calm, in which to gain added strength, renewed vigour, for the next manifestation, or awakening to activity. Thus is the march of all progress, of all manifest life - in waves, successive waves, [of] activity and repose. Waves succeed each other in an endless chain of progression.”

“All motion in this universe is in the form of waves, successively rising and falling.”

“I do not believe in eternal progress, that we are growing on ever and ever in a straight line. It is too nonsensical to believe. There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle. The force sent out will complete the circle and return to its starting place.”

“If these poems repeat themselves, then so does Spring.”

“The lord is the peasant that was,The peasant is the lord that shall be.”

“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.”

“... A nation has to take its natural courseOf Progress round and round in circlesFrom King to Mob to King to Mob to KingUntil the eddy of it eddies out.”

“Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within.”

“I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.”

“Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.”

“The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe, and gone to seed,--because both parties stand on the one ground of the supreme value of property, which one endeavors to get, and the other to keep.”

“Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun. It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is from this in nature we are from. It is most us.”

“Our life runs down in sending up the clock.The brook runs down in sending up our life.The sun runs down in sending up the brook.And there is something sending up the sun.”

“In A Glass of Cider It seemed I was a mite of sediment That waited for the bottom to ferment So I could catch a bubble in ascent. I rode up on one till the bubble burst, And when that left me to sink back reversed I was no worse off than I was at first. I'd catch another bubble if I waited. The thing was to get now and then elated.”

“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes.”

“You can remember, a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones.”

“The birth and death of leaves is part of that greater cycle that moves among the stars.”

“Death belongs to life as birth does The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down”

“The earth paints a portrait of the sun at dawn with sunflowers in bloom. Unhappy with the portrait, she erases it and paints it again and again.”

“It cannot but affect our philosophy favorably to be reminded of these shoals of migratory fishes, of salmon, shad, alewives, marsh-bankers, and others, which penetrate up the innumerable rivers of our coast in the spring, even to the interior lakes, their scales gleaming in the sun; and again, of the fry which in still greater numbers wend their way downward to the sea.”

“Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces-and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.”

“No sun outlasts its sunset, but will rise again and bring the dawn.”

“It may be observed, that provinces amid the vicissitudes to which they are subject, pass from order into confusion, and afterward recur to a state of order again; for the nature of mundane affairs not allowing them to continue in an even course, when they have arrived at their greatest perfection, they soon begin to decline.”