Top 78 Swans Quotes & Sayings

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.

Millions of years ago, in my previous incarnations, I must have been related to swans... because I can still feel that affinity.

And swans seem whiter if swart crowes be by.

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.

Swans moulting die, snow melts to tears, Roses do blush and hang their heads

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Swans live wherever there is water, and leave the place where water dries up; let not a man act so - and comes and goes as he pleases.

When turkeys mate they think of swans.

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.

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.

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.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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.

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?

There's a little pond near my house, and I see two swans there all the time who are obviously in love. But they look like the same bird, so I don't know if they're male or female, but they're definitely in love.

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.

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

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.

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.

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

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.

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines.

Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other. To live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

I had daydreamed through many performances of Swan Lake, thinking the dancing tutus only ever conveyed one aspect of swans: their beauty gliding on water. I wondered what it would be like to use male dancers and bring out swans' aggressive, muscular side.

The name came from, erm... us all just agreeing on a name that we liked. There was talk of Swans at first, but there was already a band called Swans, way back in the eighties. An American band. So we thought, well, we can't have them, and I think Andy said, "well what about Doves?" We ruminated it around the three of us and went, well, it's not so bad, it's all right.

no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

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.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

Such as ne'er saw swans May think crows beautiful.

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

swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.

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.

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.

I'm crazy about ducks and swans and geese, so I don't eat foie gras. I try to eat organic.

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.

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.

The recollected go forth to lives of renunciation. They take no pleasure in a fixed abode. Like wild swans abandoning a pool, they leave one resting place after another.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes I'll go by and there are a couple of swans, the next day it's a few ducks. I'd like to stop there every day for a year and capture how it changes, then put it all together to create an incredible image of a traditional English scene.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

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.

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.

If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.

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.'

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turn into confident ducks.

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep.

Vinod Khosla is best known for shunning convention and taking massive risks on companies he calls 'black swans' -companies with a near-complete chance of failure. But, if they succeed, the world will be forever changed.

Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.

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.

Everything I do, I want to take it to the farthest possible degree. I can't just do something the plain way. I don't cook a bowl of pasta; it has to be puff pastry swans.

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.

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.

Swans in the winter air A white perfection have

I wanted to challenge myself and move into something new. I felt that using the name Swans and the sonic attitude that that engenders was what I needed to move forward musically, and it's led to lots of new things.

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.

Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend.