46 Inspiring Fall Quotes

As the leaves turn vibrant shades of orange, red, and gold, and the air begins to carry a crisp chill, fall ushers in a season filled with reflection, warmth, and transformation. There's something uniquely magical about this time of year that inspires both introspection and inspiration. To capture the essence of autumn, we've put together a curated collection of the top 46 inspiring fall quotes. Whether you're looking to rejuvenate your spirit, find comfort in the changing season, or simply savor the beauty of nature, these quotes are sure to resonate with your love for fall. So wrap yourself in a cozy blanket, sip on a warm beverage, and let these words of wisdom and beauty envelop you in the splendor of autumn.

1. “He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.” - Christopher Marlowe

2. “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.” - Henry David Thoreau

3. “Spring passes and one remembers one's innocence.Summer passes and one remembers one's exuberance.Autumn passes and one remembers one's reverence.Winter passes and one remembers one's perseverance.” - Yoko Ono

4. “Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” - Jane Austen

5. “The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.” - Ray Bradbury

6. “A pity to survive night flights over St. Georges Channel only to crack my skull falling from a ladder.” - Eoin Colfer

7. “Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.” - Robert Browning

8. “I saw old Autumn in the misty mornStand shadowless like silence, listeningTo silence, for no lonely bird would singInto his hollow ear from woods forlorn,Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn; --Shaking his languid locks all dewy brightWith tangled gossamer that fell by night,Pearling his coronet of golden corn.” - Thomas Hood

9. “The goldenrod is yellow,The corn is turning brown...The trees in apple orchardsWith fruit are bending down.” - Helen Hunt Jackson

10. “October proved a riot a riot to the senses and climaxed those giddy last weeks before Halloween.” - Keith Donohue

11. “I ate breakfast in the kitchen by candle-light, and then drove the five miles to the station through the most glorious October colouring. The sun came up on the way, and the swamp maples and dogwood glowed crimson and orange and the stone walls and cornfields sparkled with hoar frost; the air was keen and clear and full of promise. I knew something was going to happen. ” - Jean Webster

12. “Give me a land of boughs in leafA land of trees that stand;Where trees are fallen there is grief;I love no leafless land.” - A.E. Housman

13. “You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself."Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought...” - Janette Rallison

14. “Don't you love New York in the fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.” - Nora Ephron

15. “It's September 21st, a day I love for the balance it carries with it.” - Pam Houston

16. “When real people fall down in life, they get right back up and keep on walking.” - Michael Patrick King

17. “And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?” - Mervyn Peake

18. “Strong-willed heart, always makes me feel so touched. It reminds me about some 'fall and rise again' in my life.” - Toba Beta

19. “What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

20. “…Henry is tired of winter,& haircuts, & a squeamish comfy ruin-prone proud national mind, & Spring (in the city so called)Henry likes Fall.Hé would be prepared to líve in a world of Fállfor ever, impenitent Henry.But the snows and summers grieve and dream;These fierce & airy occupations, and love,raved away so many of Henry’s yearsit is a wonder that, with in each handone of his own mad books and all,ancient fires for eyes, his head full& his heart full, he's making ready to move on.” - John Berryman

21. “And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful... or if the fall had changed the story completely.” - Scott Westerfeld

22. “But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.” - Stephen King

23. “LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.” - Charles Dickens

24. “The ground was so far below him, he could barely make it out through the grey mists that whirled around him, but he could feel how fast he was falling, and he knew what was waiting for him down there. Even in dreams, you could not fall forever. He would wake up in the instant before he hit the ground, he knew. You always woke in the instant before you hit the ground.” - George R.R. Martin

25. “The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.” - Wallace Stegner

26. “[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.” - Wallace Stegner

27. “Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."[Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]” - George Eliot

28. “A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.” - François-René de Chateaubriand

29. “Shigure: *pokes Rit in the side* JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL! <3 Rit: *falls*” - Natuski Takaya

30. “Fall. Stand. Learn. Adapt.” - Mike Norton

31. “Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.” - Siobhan Vivian

32. “Let whoever wants to, relax in the south,And bask in the garden of paradise.Here is the essence of north—and it's autumnI've chosen as this year's friend.” - Anna Akhmatova

33. “Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?” - John Banister Tabb

34. “Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.” - Catherynne M. Valente

35. “We pretended she'd only gotten lost in the colors of fall.Piper” - T. Greenwood

36. “If you fall, I'll be the there” - Floor

37. “Lest others should attempt the ascent of this terrible climb and perish, they swore themselves to secrecy (telling only enough people to ensure the perpetuation of their epic) and went off to try Everest instead.” - Whipplesnaith

38. “The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.” - James Baldwin

39. “Even in dreams, you could not fall forever.” - George R.R. Martin

40. “It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.” - Sylvia Plath

41. “Enchantment and fulfillment were on the gold and garnet horizon - autumn's breath, a dormant dream reawakened, a yearning nearly satiated, a tender thank you with a brush of the lips, and a connection as fingers touch and go hand in hand.” - Donna Lynn Hope

42. “Things fall apart. But things don't just fall apart. People break them.” - Robin Wasserman

43. “It is not important what happens where; Where we fall or rise, What we conquer or lose, How big or small we are.” - Dejan Stojanovic

44. “All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.” - Eoin Colfer

45. “When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.("The Basilisk")” - R. Murray Gilchrist

46. “By now, at the end of a sloping alley, we had reached the shores of a vast marsh. Some unknown quality in the sparkling water had stained its whole bed a bright yellow. Green leaves, of such a sour brightness as almost poisoned to behold, floated on the surface of the rush-girdled pools. Weeds like tempting veils of mossy velvet grew beneath in vivid contrast with the soil. Alders and willows hung over the margin. From where we stood a half-submerged path of rough stones, threaded by deep swift channels, crossed to the very centre.("The Basilisk")” - R. Murray Gilchrist