These swan quotes will inspire you. Swan are birds of the family Anatidae within the genus Cygnus.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging swan quotes, swan sayings, and swan proverbs.
Best Swan Quotes
- “There’s a double beauty whenever a swan
Swims on a lake with her double thereon.” ~ Thomas Hood - “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
- “Even if you enter the dirty water, stay neat like a white swan!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“Swans are majestic, beautiful-looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.” ~ Michael Gira
- “The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.” ~ Heinrich Heine
- “Swans in the winter air a white perfection have” ~ W. H. Auden
- “But calm, white calm, was born into a swan.” ~ Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth
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“Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.” ~ Robinson Jeffers
- “In the story of Ugly Duckling, when did the Ugly Duckling stop feeling Ugly? When he realized that he was a Swan. Each of us has something Special, a swan of some sort, hidden inside somewhere. But until we recognize that it’s there, what can we do but splash around, treading water? The Wise are Who They Are. They work with what they’ve got and do what they can do.” ~ Benjamin Hoff
- “If swans weren’t real myths’d make up.” ~ David Mitchell
- “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.” ~ David Hume
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“swans … always look as though they’d just been reading their own fan-mail.” ~ Jan Struther
- “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
- “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.” ~ Keith Douglas
- “I will make thee think thy swan a crow.” ~ William Shakespeare
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“If you’re looking for monogamy, you’d better marry a swan.” ~ Nora Ephron
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Being born in a duck yard does not matter if only you are hatched from a swan’s egg.” ~ Hans Christian Andersen
- “Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were to see thee in our water yet appear.” ~ Ben Jonson
- “The swan who goes on living in its parents’ tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.” ~ Arthur Golden
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“I’m telling you, the gorgeous of the world can actually look pretty intimidating when they scowl. Imagine a snow-white swan with a scary tattoo holding a chain saw. There’s just no way to really prepare for that.” ~ Jim Benton
- “The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero
- “I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep.” ~ James Elroy Flecker
- “She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.” ~ Laini Taylor
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“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
- “When turkeys mate they think of swans.” ~ Johnny Carson
- “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.” ~ Chanakya
- “Swan flocks of lilies shoreward lying, In sweetness, not in music, dying.” ~ John Greenleaf Whittier
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“Millions of years ago, in my previous incarnations, I must have been related to swans… because I can still feel that affinity.” ~ Jean Sibelius
- “O woman shapely as a swan.” ~ Padraic Colum
- “Swans sing before they die – ’twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “The silver swan, who, living had no note, When death approached unlocked her silent throat.” ~ Orlando Gibbons
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“This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.” ~ Robinson Jeffers
- “The swan in the pool is singing, And up and down doth he steer, And, singing gently ever, Dips under the water clear.” ~ Heinrich Heine
- “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.” ~ Geena Davis
- “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
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“Remember that you are a Black Swan.” ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- “Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “Now, if you notice how the swan, putting its neck down into the deep water, brings up food for itself from below, then you will discover the wisdom of the Creator, in that He gave it a neck longer than its feet for this reason, that it might, as if lowering a sort of fishing line, procure the food hidden in the deep water.” ~ Saint Basil
- “While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realized that it was something more sinister.” ~ Jung Chang
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“Such as ne’er saw swans May think crows beautiful.” ~ Philip Massinger
- “Death darkens his eyes, and unplumes his wings, Yet the sweetest song is the last he sings: Live so, my Love, that when death shall come, Swan-like and sweet it may waft thee home.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero , Swan quotes love
- “The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more: ‘Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.'” ~ Orlando Gibbons
- “You never count your chickens before they hatch. I used to keep parakeets and I never counted every egg thinking I would get all eight birds. You just hoped they came out of the nest box looking all right. I’m like a swan at the moment. I look fine on top of the water but under the water, my little legs are going mad.” ~ Ian Holloway
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“Who may be called a Paramahamsa? He who, like a swan, can take the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water. He who, like an ant, can take the sugar from a mixture of sugar and sand, leaving aside the sand.” ~ Ramakrishna
- “White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.” ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “The swan murmurs sweet strains with a flattering tongue, itself the singer of its own dirge.” ~ Martial
- “To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.” ~ Hans Christian Andersen
- “Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.” ~ William Butler Yeats -
“Get my swan costume ready.” ~ Anna Pavlova
- “Youngblood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day.” ~ Charles Kingsley
- “Typhoid and swans – it all comes from the same place.” ~ Thomas Harris
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“I think it requires a bit of honesty, Swan Lake.” ~ Graeme Murphy
- “I’ve developed into quite a swan. I’m one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older – until I drop dead of beauty.” ~ Rufus Wainwright
- “Swan Lake is the most difficult thing to portray for a female ballet dancer; it really requires such specific qualities of articulation, agility, strength, and the arm work is something that takes a lot of training.” ~ Benjamin Millepied
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“He worked night and day. He made a coat that would transform him; he would be more than a man; a winged creature, beautiful as light. All the birds brought him feathers. Even the eagle. Even the swan.” ~ Catherine Fisher
- “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
- “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
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“Sweetmeat must have sour sauce.” ~ Ben Jonson
- “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
- “You cannot dance an arabesque in ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Nutcracker’ the same way.” ~ Natalia Makarova
- “Let the long contention cease! / Geese are swans, and swans are geese.” ~ Matthew Arnold
