Icarus Quotes

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars. ~ George Steiner

Icarus."
"Hmm?"
"I don't have a hidden agenda. Nor do I intend to use you or mislead you with my charm."
Despite herself, she smiled, glancing at him. His face was studiously neutral.
"The day you act charming, I'll know something is wrong. ~ Dru Pagliassotti

Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it ~ Seth Godin

I think I finally understand the saying like a moth to a flame. I'm the moth. My heart flutters like the paper thin wings. And he is the flame, incendiary, scorching my soul.
He inhales so heavily, like he's been holding his breath under water. He presses his lips against mine and tugs at my hair gently. My head falls back and my mouth falls open. His tongue, slick as silver, dances with mine.
I'm wrong. I'm not a moth. I'm Icarus and I've flown too close to the sun. ~ A.D. Evans

He moved on from Anatole France to the eighteenth-century philosophers, though not to Rousseau. Perhaps this was because one side of him - the side easily moved by passion - was too close to Rousseau. Instead, he approached the author of 'Candide', who was closer to another side of him - the cool and richly intellectual side.
At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings.
Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun - as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun. ~ Ryunosuke Akutagawa

It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble ... If you're constantly pushing yourself higher ... the law of averages, not to mention the Myth of Icarus, predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. ~ Oprah Winfrey

If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages - not to mention the myth of Icarus - predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure. ~ Oprah Winfrey

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph. ~ Jack Gilbert

In the legends that males have invented to explain life, the first human creature is a man named Adam. Eve arrives later, to give him pleasure and cause trouble. In the paintings that adorn churches, God is an old man with a beard, never an old woman with white hair. And all the heroes are males: from Prometheus who discovered fire to Icarus who tried to fly, on down to Jesus whom they call the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit, almost as though the woman giving birth to him were an incubator or a wetnurse. ~ Oriana Fallaci

Rare stories traveled of those who rose too high, the ships who sailed like Icarus towards the sun.

And like him, they crashed and burned for their arrogance. ~ Katherine McIntyre

Icarus burned because he flew during the day. He wanted the world to see. We fly in the darkness, where people are afraid to look. ~ J.J. McAvoy

Love is weakness, Icarus, the man had said, grim, 'It is Man's deadliest weapon, greater than the sword and mightier than the axe - because it can destroy you with a single breath. ~ Grace Curley

Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Love and Friendship, when you have them or lose them they are much like the Greek story of Icarus...
You can make you feel like you're soaring above the clouds with happiness when you have them or feel like you are plummeting to the depths of hell with despair when you lose them. ~ Anonymous

I like to judge people and it was clear to me that Colin's life has been about as exciting as a cluster headache. You can tell this just from his humour tumour which runs through every conversation you have with him. I got the impression that Colin had arrived at his early fifties resenting the fact that he's spent his entire career worshiping at the altar of Dynasty PLC. But he is now so indoctrinated by the world of corporate banking that he's forgotten how to express the real him.

This is what a life working for large corporations does to people. The workplace is a place not to be you; it's a place to be the corporate you. The you that doesn't really exist. We all see this corporate you and pretend that it's a normal part of life. But we know that something isn't quite right. We know that the real you is slowly fading away like old wallpaper. The corporate you is a myth; just like Icarus. And yet we are powerless against it. All of us are powerless against the wrath of the corporate world. ~ Rupert Dreyfus

No,' I answered. 'But you're a shell, Icarus. One that can be opened. A darkness into which one can speak and call things out. You'll tell me about it one day, when you're ready. ~ K.A. Emmons

Anastasia," he whispers. "What are you doing to me?" "I could say the same to you," I whisper back. Taking a deep breath, he kisses my forehead and leaves. He strolls purposefully down the path toward his car as he runs his hand through his hair. Glancing up as he opens his car door, he smiles his breathtaking smile. My answering smile is weak, completely dazzled by him, and I'm reminded once more of Icarus soaring too close to the sun. I close the front door as he climbs into his sports car. I have an overwhelming urge to cry; a sad and lonely melancholy grips and tightens around my heart. Dashing back to my bedroom, I close the door and lean against it, trying to rationalize my feelings. I can't. Sliding to the floor, I put my head in my hands as my tears begin to flow. ~ E.L. James

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

All limits are self imposed. ~ Icarus

Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. ~ Edward O. Wilson

To A Friend Whose Work Has Come To Triumph
Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wintgs on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that feel back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town. ~ Anne Sexton

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.
From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954 ~ Sylvia Plath

Some upstarts always try to get closer to the source of creation by ascending to the source's level. The story of Icarus is of course a parable about the folly of such an effort. Get too close to the sun and your hubris will get you burned. Yet in the eyes of twenty-first-century capitalist culture, which worships at the twin altars of the individual and technology, Icarus had initiative. And his melted wings do not represent some deep character flaw; he just needed better beta testers. ~ Marcus Wohlsen

But I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive. ~ Randall Munroe

There are galaxies within the human mind, and madness wants to risk everything for the daring flight, reckless and beautiful and crazed. Everyone knows Icarus fell. But I love him for the fact that he dared to fly. Mania unfurls the invitation to fly too high, too near the sun, which will melt the wax of the mind, and the fall will be terrible. ~ Jay Griffiths

Love is not weakness, father: it is strength. Love is what taught my skin to feel and my eyes to see. Love is not a weapon: it is light. ~ Grace Curley

He took a deep breath. 'To marry me,' he said quietly. It was easier than he thought. Icarus did not fall from the sky; the ground did not open; the earth did not wobble on its trajectory. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Love gives you wings. Icarus and the Challenger both had wings, and so did my first love letter, after I folded it up and flung it at my crush. ~ Jarod Kintz

Yes, Icarus fell to earth after flying too close to the sun, but what a glorious fall it must have been. Almost worth the flaming wings tied to his arms, waving helplessly in a shower of ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I feel the familiar pull - I am drawn, Icarus to his sun. I have been burned already, and yet here I am again.

~Anastasia ~ E.L. James

At the critical moment it is the rare few who can do what needs to be done.
-Icarus ~ Boone Brux

I am on warp-speed headed directly for the sun; I am Icarus." (opening line of 'Girl on a Bar Stool', new / CreateSpace version) ~ Tim Roux

Tends to rivet our attention on the Icarus companies ~ James C. Collins

Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say. ~ Seth

Greek myths are heroic, noble and tragic; but the American Dream is heroic, comical, and uplifting. Americans are a people in whom overweening ambition is rewarded, not punished. The Wright Brothers did not have their wings melt when they flew too high. Perhaps their wings were more soundly built than those of Icarus. ~ John C. Wright

Beyond its romance, 'Titanic' offers an indelibly wrenching story of blind arrogance and its terrible consequences. It's the rare Hollywood adventure film that brings mythic images of tragedy - the fall of Icarus, the ruin of Ozymandias - so easily to mind. ~ Janet Maslin

Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies.

If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life. ~ John N. Gray

Man has been thrown into the world. It had always made him think of Icarus and those other great tumblers, Ixion, Phaeton, Tantalus - all these jumpers without parachutes from a world of gods and heroes. ~ Cees Nooteboom

I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

- Mrs Icarus ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning ~ William Carlos Williams

This emotion called love. It is wrapped up in time, measured by years. The more I see of humans the more complicated love becomes. It is not an exchange of goods. It has no price. it is not a simple connection to other beings. Love is much deeper, its tendrils reach into the bad and the good in humans. I don't believe we should give up on this project. I cannot return until I learn how to love. ~ Sally Gardner

Think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings! ~ Anne Sexton

How oft the warmth of the sun above
Makes a pretty young girl dream of love. ~ Gustave Flaubert

All great achievements arose from dissatisfaction. It is the desire to do better, to dig deeper that propels a civilization to greatness. All of us have heard the story of Icarus, the young boy who took the wings his father built for him. Wings that were meant to carry him over the ocean to freedom and used them instead for a joyride. For a brief moment Icarus felt what it was like to live like a god, to touch the sun, to soar above the common man. And for doing so he payed the ultimate price. Like Icarus we too have been given gifts: knowledge, education, experience. And with these gifts comes the responsibility of choice. We alone decide how our talents are bestowed upon the world. This is our destiny and we hold it in the palm of our hands. ~ Todd Bowden Apt Pupil

Most often, couples who get together after months or years of online infatuation enact a twenty-first-century version of Icarus flying too close to the sun with his waxen wings: the real-life exposure quickly melts the fiber-optic cable that was holding the couple aloft, and they plummet into the sea, where they tend to flail about for a while, trying to rescue their former magic. ~ Daniel Jones

All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Agayev, Colossus by Finn Alnaes, Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer and Post Office by Charles Bukowski.

Books about young men who struggled to fit into society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, in short, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They travelled, they got drunk, they read and they dreamed about their life's Great Passion or writing the Great Novel.

Everything they wanted I wanted too. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. ~ Eugene Ionesco

You have married an Icarus;
He has flown too close to the sun ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

There are split seconds in the morning between waking and sleep when you know nothing. Not just things missing like where or who you are, but nothing. The fact of being alive has no substance. No awareness of skin and bone, the trap inside the skull. For these split seconds you hover in the sky like Icarus. Then you remember ~ Janice Galloway

Icarus did not survive his fall. We can only hope Daedalus fares better. ~ Michael J. Martinez

4. The whole Icarus-flying-too-near-the-sun-and-plummeting-out-of-the-sky thing? That's real. Same with the Sirens who lure you to death with their irresistible song, and the odalisque so beautiful anyone who looks at her dies. And remember: as badass as Grendel was, Beowulf hadn't seen anything until he went up against Grendel's mother. I know, I know - I thought they were just myths too. But the fact is, sometimes, if you don't want to meet a tragic end, your only option is to avert your gaze, tie yourself to the mast with cotton in your ears, or ascend a little less close to the Vault of Heaven. ~ Todd Hanson

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure - a rogue synthophage had taken out the world's Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look - but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. ~ Peter Watts

Waiting for Icarus "

He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

Icarus flew too close to the sun, but at least he flew. ~ Jeremy Robert Johnson

The scene [Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'] is filled with a vast field, and a cow and a farmer plowing. In the left-hand corner is a tiny ocean the size of a palm, and there, I can barely make it out, the two legs of a man who fell headlong into the sea. This is called the Fall of Icarus. Compared to everyday life, the fall of an idealist who flew too high with candle-wax wings is an unremarkable tragedy. ~ Hwang Sok-yong

Some would say that the winged boy loved the sun, loved him with his very own soul and every fibre in his body. His father had warned him: Don't fly too close to the sun, boy, you know better. But who was he to listen? ~ Grace Curley

For all those who believed me,
and for all those who didn't.
It can't be easy hearing
things that you shouldn't. ~ Icarus X.

Sun-brushed hands trailed circles on his wings, opening new ways to touch the sky. The dance is the dalliance of the whispers, unsaid desires brighter than eternal suns. His teeth of flint and steel, the sun boy's lips like ichor. ~ Grace Curley

Aerotechnik Super Vivat Icarus motorgliders had an enormous wingspan and looked like a typical side-by-side pilot/passenger configuration sailplane that had been crossed with a small Cessna single-prop aircraft. ~ Brad Thor

It was sad and fierce all at once, alive with a lonely purity. ~ Karen Russell

The fallen
Leaf flies
Like a
Young Icarus
And
Then
Disintegrates ~ Matthew Quick

The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality. ~ Louis Bleriot