Winter Wisdom

• Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. —Pietro Aretino
• As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains. —Charles Baudelaire
• Memory is the best of all gardens. Therein, winter and summer, the seeds of their past lie dormant, ready to spring into instant bloom at any moment the mind wishes to bring them to life. —Hal Boyle
• If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. —Anne Bradstreet
• In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. —Albert Camus
• Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. —Willa Cather
• People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy. —Anton Chekhov
• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . . it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair . . . in short, the period was so far like the present period . . . . —Charles Dickens
• There's a certain slant of light,
  On winter afternoons,
  That oppresses, like the weight
  Of Cathedral tunes. —Emily Dickinson
• Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The English winter—ending in July,
  To recommence in August. —George Gordon Byron
• God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger. — Heraclitus of Ephesus
• Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all. —Stanley Horowitz
• Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face. —Victor Hugo
• Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth. —Soren Kierkegaard
• No one thinks of winter when the grass is green. —Rudyard Kipling
• Winter is not a season; it's an occupation. —Sinclair Lewis
• There are many in this old world of ours who hold that things break about even for all of us. I have observed for example that we all get about the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter. —Bat Masterson
• The balance of nature is reached when heating the house costs as much as going south for the winter. —James H. McGavran
• Grace groweth best in winter. —Samuel Rutherford
• Never cut a tree down in the winter. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come. —Robert Schuller
• My age is as a lusty winter,
  Frosty but kindly. —William Shakespeare
• O, Wind,
  If winter comes,
  can Spring be far behind? —Percy Bysshe Shelley
• What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter's day? —Henry David Thoreau
• Four dry logs have in them all the circumstances necessary to a conversation for 4 or 5 hours. Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius. — Anonymous
• When one has faith that the spring thaw will arrive, the winter winds seem to lose some of their punch. —Robert L. Veninga
• Laziness has many disguises. Soon "winter doldrums" will become "spring fever." —Ben Williams
• We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them. —Woodrow Wilson
• In a way winter is the real spring, the time when the inner things happen, the resurge of nature. —Edna O'Brien