Quotes & Sayings About Vapour

...most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best--a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real "there" there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such 'cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival. — Gemma Files

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. James 4:14 — Bible

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven. — Charles Dickens

The sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth. This, as we have said before, is the regular course of nature. — Aristotle.

She noticed immediately that they were now in an altogether paler country. The sun had disappeared above a film of vapour. The air was becoming cooler every minute. The land was flat and treeless and there seemed to be no colour in it at all. Every minute, the mist became thicker. The air became colder still and everything became paler and paler until soon there was nothing but grey and white all around them. They were in a country of swirling mists and ghostly vapours. There was some sort of grass underfoot but it was not green. It was ashy grey. — Roald Dahl

O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper, which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour. — Lord Byron

I am like a remnant of a cloud of autumn uselessly roaming in the sky, O my sun ever-glorious! Thy touch has not yet melted my vapour, making me one with thy light, and thus I count months and years separated from thee.
If this be thy wish and if this be thy play, then take this fleeting emptiness of mine, paint it with colours, gild it with gold, float it on the wanton wind and spread it in varied wonders.
And again when it shall be thy wish to end this play at night, I shall melt and vanish away in the dark, or it may be in a smile of the white morning, in a coolness of purity transparent. — Rabindranath Tagore

The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze. Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight: rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was crowned with a star; the lineaments below were seen as through the suffusion of vapour; the eyes shone dark and wild; the hair streamed shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail. On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight; the same faint lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed this vision of the Evening Star. — Charlotte Bronte

We know not which most to wonder at, the faithfulness of God or the unbelief of His people. He keeps His promise a thousand times, and yet the next trial makes us doubt Him. He never faileth; He is never a dry well; He is never as a setting sun, a passing meteor, or a melting vapour; and yet we are as continually vexed with anxieties, molested with suspicions, and disturbed with fears, as if our God were the mirage of the desert. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet. — Virginia Woolf

Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment. The same thing is true in every case of the kind: wine and all fluids that evaporate and condense back into a liquid state become water. They all are water modified by a certain admixture, the nature of which determines their flavour. — Aristotle.

(he was a great believer in the healing powers of cheerfulness, if not of open mirth). Yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of enquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru. — Patrick O'Brian

It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all. — Lauren Oliver

By the time we had passed St Clement Dane's, the pavements had grown less crowded, and as we drew by the Temple, thick woolly clouds of vapour were curling up from the steep lanes leading down to the river on our right and were beginning to suffuse the light from the gas-lamps and to deepen the gloom of the quieter streets of that quarter. Past St Paul's, on through the sepulchral City and up beyond Bishopsgate, the breeze had dropped and the haze grew thicker and heavier. By the time we had arrived at our rendezvous with Lestrade in a warren of dismal backstreets in Spitalfields, we were mired in the drab wraiths of a summer fog. — Seamus Duffy

The town is mobbed out with Saturday shoppers looking for Christmas bargains. You can almost breathe in the raw greed which hangs in the air like vapour. As the late afternoon darkness falls, the lights look tacky and sinister. — Irvine Welsh

Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Evan guessed what the monster was going to do a second before it happened. He seized Jed's collar and pulled him down as the Psyking spewed forth a torrent of icy vapour.
The frost fire stuck the rock behind them, turning it into an icicle. — Will Collins

The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud is a vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness. — John Stuart Mill

An old poet, Robert Herrick, put it like this: " Our life is short, and our days run As fast away as does the sun; And, as a vapour or a drop of rain Once lost, can ne'er be found again. — Douglas Preston

What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? — Mary Wollstonecraft

The rain is plentious but, by God's decree,
Only a third is meant for you and me;
Two-thirds are taken by the growing things
Or vanish Heavenward on vapour's wings:
Nor does it mathematically fall
With social equity on one and all.
The population's habit is to grow
In every region where the water's low:
Nature is blamed for failings that are Man's,
And well-run rivers have to change their plans. — A.P. Herbert

Look at this fog. The damp gets right into your bones. It's doing my chest no good at all. I'll need a vapour bath." Bryant pulled down his scarf and peered over the sodden hedge. Dew had formed on his bald head and ears. He resembled a minor Tolkien character.
"You're getting old before your time," warned May. "I can't imagine what you'll look like in your eighties."
"I'm ageing gracefully, which means not trying to look like a member of Concrete Blimp."
"I assume you mean Led Zeppelin ... — Christopher Fowler

They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all. — J.R.R. Tolkien

By the end of the week, clouds darker still had arrived and with them hot, damp air. Turner could smell the coming storm. The darkness of it gathering an hour or so away, racing ahead of dusk - the edges of the cloud through the wide skylight, deep in the West. Bruised. Fractious. Rising up to smother the slowly sinking sun. And now it was all but upon him, this vast wave of vapour, tumbling overhead.
A deep violet shadow poured down through the glass, its false twilight drowning everything. There came the first shudderings of thunder. And, all around, a dangerous stormlight. Carravaggian. — John A. Scott

The impersonal aspect [of God] (Nirakara, Nirguna) is called Brahman, or 'unknowable' by Herbert Spencer, 'will' by Schopenhauer, Absolute Noumenon by some 'substance' by Spinoza. The personal aspect (Sakara) of that Being is termed 'Ishvara' or Allah, Hari, Jehova, Father in Heaven, Buddha, Siva, etc. Just as vapour or steam is formless, so also God is formless in His unmanifested or transcendental state. — Sivananda

What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper: Some liken it to climbing up a hill, Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour: For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper," To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust. — Lord Byron

Changes in clouds and rainfall can overwhelm what little effect CO2-water vapour has on temperature. — Willie Soon

The cause of rain is now, I consider, no longer an object of doubt. If two masses of air of unequal temperatures, by the ordinary currents of the winds, are intermixed, when saturated with vapour, a precipitation ensues. If the masses are under saturation, then less precipitation takes place, or none at all, according to the degree. Also, the warmer the air, the greater is the quantity of vapour precipitated in like circumstances ... Hence the reason why rains are heavier in summer than in winter, and in warm countries than in cold. — John Dalton

A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire. — Samuel Johnson

A great sea fog is not homogenous
its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain. — Henry De Vere Stacpoole

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. but even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this. — Blaise Pascal

I send thee, love, this upland flower I found
While wandering lonely with o'erclouded heart,
Hid in a grey recess of rocky ground
Among the misty mountains far apart;
And then I heard the wild wind's luring sound
Which whoso trusts, is healed of earthborn care,
And watched the lofty ridges loom around,
Yet yearned in vain their secret faith to share.
When lo! the sudden sunlight, sparkling keen,
Poured full upon the vales this glorious day,
And bared the abiding mountain-tops serene,
And swept the shifting vapour-wreaths away:
Then with the hills' true heart my heart beat true,
Heavens opened, cloud-thoughts vanished, and I knew. — Henry Stephens Salt

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. — Kiran Desai

Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amidst these changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment. His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed. — Charlotte Bronte

After many missions in a plethora of peculiar realms, he'd managed to keep the fear of monsters locked away, but his own evil terrified him more than any demon.
Snow fell hard, bodies fell harder.
The snow was blue here, a shade lighter than the crystalline trees surrounding them. They were in the ice jungle of Eltika, where the undergrowth was littered with a thousand ice shards and the tree vines emitted vapour cold enough to cause frostbite.
Arantay took time to survey the battle before his next opponent. — Will Collins

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

LE CHIFFRE looked incuriously at him, the whites of his eyes, which showed all round the irises, lending something impassive and doll-like to his gaze. He slowly removed one thick hand from the table and slipped it into the pocket of his dinner-jacket. The hand came out holding a small metal cylinder with a cap which Le Chiffre unscrewed. He inserted the nozzle of the cylinder, with an obscene deliberation, twice into each black nostril in turn, and luxuriously inhaled the benzedrine vapour. — Ian Fleming

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair — T. S. Eliot

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. — Rebecca West

What I have related is sufficient for establishing the main principle, namely, that the heat which disappears in the conversion of water into vapour, is not lost, but is retained in vapour, and indicated by its expansive form, although it does not affect the thermometer. This heat emerges again from this vapour when it becomes water, and recovers its former quality of affecting the thermometer; in short, it appears again as the cause of heat and expansion. — Joseph Black

Ws 7:24 For wisdom is more active than all active things; and reacheth everywhere, by reason of her purity. Ws 7:25 For she is a vapour of the power of God, and a certain pure emmanation of the glory of the Almighty God: and therefore no defiled thing cometh into her. Ws 7:26 For she is the brightness of eternal light, and the unspotted mirror of God's majesty, and the image of his goodness. — Various

At that tasted Fruit The Sun, as from THYESTEAN Banquet, turn'd His course intended; else how had the World Inhabited, though sinless, more then now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heate? These changes in the Heav'ns, though slow, produc'd Like change on Sea and Land, sideral blast, Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent: Now from the North Of NORUMBEGA, and the SAMOED shoar Bursting thir brazen Dungeon, armd with ice And snow and haile and stormie gust and flaw, BOREAS and CAECIAS and ARGESTES loud And THRASCIAS rend the Woods and Seas upturn; — John Milton

The day succeeding this remarkable Midsummer night, proved no common day. I do not mean that it brought signs in heaven above, or portents on the earth beneath; nor do I allude to meteorological phenomena, to storm, flood, or whirlwind. On the contrary: the sun rose jocund, with a July face. Morning decked her beauty with rubies, and so filled her lap with roses, that they fell from her in showers, making her path blush: the Hours woke fresh as nymphs, and emptying on the early hills their dew-vials, they stepped out dismantled of vapour: shadowless, azure, and glorious, they led the sun's steeds on a burning and unclouded course. — Charlotte Bronte

What physicians call perspirable matter is that vapour which passes off from our bodies, from the lungs, and through the pores of the skin. The quantity of this is said to be five eighths of what we eat. - Author. — Benjamin Franklin

The air was still. The silvery vapour hung serenely on the far horizon, and the frosty stars blinked brightly. Everyone knows the effect of such a scene on a mind already saddened. Fancies and regrets float mistily in the dream, and the scene affects us with a strange mixture of memory and anticipation, like some sweet old air heard in the distance. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Become nothing...
hurry .... dissolve ...
end the fire ...
Drown in the ocean of love...
Disintegrate...
Become like water
No even lighter
Ethereal Vapour
Bellow across the hearts
Embalm spirits
Create Bliss. — Gabriel Iqbal

Everything of the body is a river. Everything of the soul is dream and vapour. Life is war and the abode of a stranger. The only fame after death is oblivion. — Marcus Aurelius

The floating vapour is just as true an illustration of the law of gravity as the falling avalanche. — John Burroughs

All of the waves and waters hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water turned into vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew. — Hermann Hesse

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king. — Johann Joachim Becher

Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert — T.E. Lawrence

I am not a collection of members which we call the human body: I am not a subtle air distributed through these members, I am not a wind, a fire, a vapour, a breath, nor anything at all which I can imagine or conceive; because I have assumed that all these were nothing. Without changing that supposition I find that I only leave myself certain of the fact that I am somewhat. — Rene Descartes

Nature ... is, as it were, a continual circulation. Water is rais'd in Vapour into the Air by one Quality and precipitated down in drops by another, the Rivers run into the Sea, and the Sea again supplies them. — Robert Hooke

Without any doubt, the regularity which astronomy shows us in the movements of the comets takes place in all phenomena. The trajectory of a simple molecule of air or vapour is regulated in a manner as certain as that of the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which is contributed by our ignorance. Probability is relative in part to this ignorance, and in part to our knowledge. — Pierre-Simon Laplace

GLOUCESTER: Yet so much is my poverty of spirit, So mighty and so many my defects, As I had rather hide me from my greatness, Being a bark to brook no mighty sea, Than in my greatness covet to be hid, And in the vapour of my glory smother'd. But God be thanked ... — William Shakespeare

And it is said that extraordinary rains generally dash down after great battles, whether it is that some divine power drenches and hallows the ground with purifying waters from Heaven, or that the blood and putrefying matter send up a moist and heavy vapour which condenses the air, this being easily moved and readily changed to the highest degree by the slightest cause. — Plutarch

Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I never knew any man who had once tasted the sweetness of experimental knowledge, that ever afterward fasted after ye Vapour garlick and onions of phantasmatical seeming philosophy. {William Petty] — Carl Zimmer

The Reverie of Poor Susan
AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has pass'd by the spot, and has heard
In the silence of morning the song of the bird.
'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale
Down which she so often has tripp'd with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all pass'd away from her eyes! — William Wordsworth

Facta! Yes, Facta ficta! - A historian has to do, not with what actually happened, but only with events supposed to have happened: for only the latter have produced an effect. Likewise only with supposed heroes. His theme, so-called world history, is opinions about supposed actions and their supposed motives, which in turn give rise to further opinions and actions, the reality of which is however at once vaporised again and produces an effect only as vapour - a continual generation and pregnancy of phantoms over the impentetrable mist of unfathomable reality. All historians speak of things which have never existed except in imagination. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Asleep by the Smiths
Vapour Trail by Ride
Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel
A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum
Dear Prudence by the Beatles
Gypsy by Suzanne Vega
Nights in White Satin by the Moody Blues
Daydream by Smashing Pumpkins
Dusk by Genesis (before Phil Collins was even in the band!)
MLK by U2
Blackbird by the Beatles
Landslide by Fleetwood Mac
Asleep by the Smiths (again!)
-Charlie's mixtape — Stephen Chbosky

Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary much. Beauty if vapour from the pit of death. — J.A. Baker

With lacquerware there is an extra beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth, when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation ... a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance. — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

There is some CO2-water vapor feedback. But it's not operating on a global scale. The modellers cannot accurately separate water vapour from the effects of clouds and rainfall. — Willie Soon

The rotation of the polarization plane is extraordinarily small in all gases, thus also in sodium vapour. — Pieter Zeeman

As the moths around a taper,
As the bees around a rose,
As the gnats around a vapour,
So the spirits group and close
Round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Iranian parents can't stop their children. They're just wild - they want to party, they want their rights, they want to paint, they want to dance. No one can stop these new generations coming. That's why Iran has to open up: it's like a pot full of hot water, vapour and steam. — Golshifteh Farahani

GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam
the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. — George MacDonald

Siddhartha saw it hurrying, the river, which consisted of him and his loved ones and of all people, he had ever seen, all of these waves and waters were hurrying, suffering, towards goals, many goals, the waterfall, the lake, the rapids, the sea, and all goals were reached, and every goal was followed by a new one, and the water turned into vapour and rose to the sky, turned into rain and poured down from the sky, turned into a source, a stream, a river, headed forward once again, flowed on once again. — Hermann Hesse

But the fact is, again and again in my lifetime, the vicious vituperations, the polemics, the dialectics, the sophistries of politics have become vapour and mist, while what remains is the literature and the art, which at the time might have been merely tolerated by the politicos. — Doris Lessing

So long as we perceive this world in motion, we have to conceive will behind it. — Swami Vivekananda