85 Inspiring Autumn Quotes

As the vibrant hues of summer slowly give way to the rich, warm tones of autumn, there's a certain magic in the air that captivates the soul. The crisp air and crunch of fallen leaves underfoot remind us of the beauty and impermanence of change. Autumn is a season that invites reflection and inspiration, offering countless moments to pause and appreciate the world around us. In this spirit of transformation and appreciation, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 85 inspiring autumn quotes. Each quote captures the essence of the season, encouraging you to embrace the changing landscape and find inspiration in the cozy charm of autumn days. Whether you're sipping a warm cup of cider or taking a leisurely stroll through a park, let these words enhance your seasonal experience and ignite your imagination.

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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” - J.K. Rowling

5. “At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

6. “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.” - Ray Bradbury

7. “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face."[The Autumnal]” - John Donne

8. “Listen! The wind is rising, and the air is wild with leaves,We have had our summer evenings, now for October eves!” - Humbert Wolfe

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

10. “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

11. “Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us...” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

12. “Autumn...the year's last, loveliest smile."[Indian Summer]” - John Howard Bryant

13. “Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.” - Jim Bishop

14. “The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter wools.” - Henry Beston

15. “Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard."[Give me the splendid silent sun]” - Walt Whitman

16. “The tints of autumn...a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, frost.” - John Greenleaf Whittier

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

18. “Leaves covered pavement like soggy cereal.” - Patricia Cornwell

19. “Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they're falling likethey're falling in love with the ground.” - Andrea Gibson

20. “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

21. “StillIn the fall, I believe again in poetryif nothing else it isa movement of the mind.Summers ball togetherinto sticky lumps,spring evenings are glass beads from one mouldfor standard-size youth,winter a smooth heaviness, not even cold.But the mind trembleshere, on the brinkthe mind tremblesthere is life, after all,there is life, stillunbelief left.” - Jaakko A. Ahokas

22. “Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.” - Remy De Gourmont

23. “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” - L. M. Montgomery

24. “I met Anne in the autumn... Autumn, that wild season when rural men rack orchard trees with sticks and weep with the desire to kiss faraway Demeter’s supple breasts—to set lips to her travel-swollen eyes. They seek goddesses, but I desired only Anne. ” - Roman Payne

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

26. “An autumn garden has a sadness when the sun is not shining...” - Francis Brett Young

27. “Kareeda niKarasu no tomarikeriAki no kuretrans:On a bare branchA crow is perched -Autumn evening” - Basho

28. “He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother's house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.There would be no spring. ("The October Game")” - Ray Bradbury

29. “Nobody moved.Everybody sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, “I'll go upstairs and look!” and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, “Marion, Marion, Marion!” over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, “I can't find her.”Then... some idiot turned on the lights.("The October Game")” - Ray Bradbury

30. “Love the trees until their leaves fall off, then encourage them to try again next year.” - Chad Sugg

31. “Perhaps because it seems so appropriate, I don't notice the rain. It falls in sheets, a blanket of silvery thread rushing to the hard almost-winter ground. Still, I stand without moving at the side of the coffin.” - Michelle Zink

32. “She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened.” - Sarah Addison Allen

33. “Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.” - Lauren DeStefano

34. “Why should I wake when I'm half past dead?” - Emilie Autumn

35. “But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North")” - Yevgeny Zamyatin

36. “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

37. “To-day I thinkOnly with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,And the square mustard field;Odours that riseWhen the spade wounds the root of tree,Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,Rhubarb or celery;The smoke's smell, too,Flowing from where a bonfire burnsThe dead, the waste, the dangerous,And all to sweetness turns.It is enoughTo smell, to crumble the dark earth,While the robin sings over againSad songs of Autumn mirth."- A poem called DIGGING.” - Edward Thomas

38. “It was one of those perfect New York October afternoons, when the explosion of oranges and yellows against the bright blue sky makes you feel like your life is passing through your fingers, that you've felt this autumn-feeling before and you'll probably get to feel it again, but one day you won't anymore, because you'll be dead.” - Sarah Dunn

39. “Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.” - Leo Tolstoy

40. “I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."[Notebook, Oct. 10, 1842]” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

41. “Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.” - Samuel Butler

42. “Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.” - Sharon Kay Penman

43. “...as the slow sea sucked at the shore and then withdrew, leaving the strip of seaweed bare and the shingle churned, the sea birds raced and ran upon the beaches. Then that same impulse to flight seized upon them too. Crying, whistling, calling, they skimmed the placid sea and left the shore. Make haste, make speed, hurry and begone; yet where, and to what purpose? The restless urge of autumn, unsatisfying, sad, had put a spell upon them and they must flock, and wheel, and cry; they must spill themselves of motion before winter came.” - Daphne du Maurier

44. “Time remorselessly rambles down the corridors and streets of our lives. but it is not until autumn that most of us become aware that our tickets are stamped with a terminal destination.” - Joe L. Wheeler

45. “There is something incredibly nostalgic and significant about the annual cascade of autumn leaves.” - Joe L. Wheeler

46. “My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.” - Henry Beston

47. “Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.” - Don Roff

48. “Tiho, o tiho govori mi jesen;Šuštanjem lišća i šapatom kiše.Al zima srcu govori još tiše.I kada sniježi, a spušta se tama,U pahuljama tišina je sama.” - Dobriša Cesarić

49. “This was hers and hers alone. Forevermore. Or at least so I thought… but shit didn’t work out that way, and then you came along… and circle be damned, I don’t want to be finished with you.” Now it was her turn to feel poleaxed, her body going numb as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying. “Autumn, I’m in love with you—that’s why I came here tonight. And we don’t have to be together, and you don’t have to get over what I said, but I wanted you to hear that from me. And I also want to tell you that I’m at peace with it, because…” He took a deep breath. “You want to know why Wellsie got pregnant? It wasn’t because I wanted a young. It’s because she knew that every night when I left the house I could get killed in the field, and as she said, she wanted something to keep on living for. If I had been the one to go? She would have carved out a life for herself, and… the strange thing is, I would have wanted her to do that. Even if it included someone else. I guess I’ve realized that… she wouldn’t have wanted me to mourn her forever. She’d have wanted me to move on… and I have.” - J.R. Ward

50. “I was drinking in the surroundings: air so crisp you could snap it with your fingers and greens in every lush shade imaginable offset by autumnal flashes of red and yellow.” - Wendy Delsol

51. “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

52. “The smell of burning firewood and the molding of organic, earthy substances reminded her of jumping wildly into the enormous leaf piles of autumns past and she suddenly wished that it was appropriate for someone her age to do such a thing.” - Abby Slovin

53. “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

54. “Flowers, cold from the dew,And autumn's approaching breath,I pluck for the warm, luxuriant braids,Which haven't faded yet.In their nights, fragrantly resinous,Entwined with delightful mystery,They will breathe in her springlikeExtraordinary beauty.But in a whirlwind of sound and fire,From her shing head they will flutterAnd fall—and before herThey will die, faintly fragrant still.And, impelled by faithful longing,My obedient gaze will feast upon them—With a reverent hand,Love will gather their rotting remains.” - Anna Akhmatova

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

56. “Autumn is no time to lie alone” - Murasaki Shikibu

57. “Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me?” - Ray Bradbury

58. “Que sigue pagando el otono con tanto dinero amarillo?What does autumn go on paying forwith so much yellow money?” - Pablo Neruda

59. “And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

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

61. “Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.” - Allison Winn Scotch

62. “Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.” - David Mitchell

63. “It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” - PG Wodehouse Jeeves and the Old School Chum

64. “I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rains came, driven sideways through the trees by north winds, and snows followed.” - Sarah Micklem

65. “Maybe late afternoon is autumn; summer’s retreatnot being archived, but suspended, as the featheredvane of a bird wings its way across the avenue.” - Michelle Cahill

66. “...the air has that bracing autumnal bite so that all you want to do is bob for apples or hang a witch or something.” - Sarah Vowell

67. “L'automne est un deuxième ressort où chaque feuille est une fleur.” - Albert Camus

68. “The first sorrow of autumn is the slow good-bye of the garden that stands so long in the evening—a brown poppy head, the stalk of a lily, and still cannot go.The second sorrow is the empty feet of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers. The woodland of gold is folded in feathers with its head in a bag.And the third sorrow is the slow good-bye of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers the minutes of evening, the golden and holy ground of the picture.The fourth sorrow is the pond gone black, ruined, and sunken the city of water—the beetle's palace, the catacombs of the dragonfly.And the fifth sorrow is the slow good-bye of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp. One day it's gone. It has only left litter—firewood, tent poles.And the sixth sorrow is the fox's sorrow, the joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds, the hooves that pound; till earth closes her ear to the fox's prayer.And the seventh sorrow is the slow good-bye of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window as the year packs up like a tatty fairground that came for the children.” - Ted Hughes

69. “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

70. “...he could feel hot tears coming to his eyes as the image of that night, outside the house as the November wind blew black leaves up off the ground and the sky turned colors like bruised flesh.” - David Nickle

71. “I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. 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 to 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

72. “His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.” - Neil Gaiman

73. “Autumn is my spring!” - August Strindberg

74. “Meanwhile the colonel followed the mad woman, and by a strange effect of the superexcitation of his senses, saw her in the darkness, through the mist, as plainly as in broad daylight; he heard her sighs, her confused words, in spite of the continual moan of the autumn winds rushing through the deserted streets. A few late townspeople, the collars of their coats raised to the level of their ears, their hands in their pockets, and their hats pressed down over their eyes, passed, at infrequent intervals, along the pavements; doors were heard to shut with a crash. An ill-fastened shutter banged against a wall, a tile torn from a housetop by the wind fell into the street; then, again, the immense torrent of air whirled on its course, drowning with its lugubrious voice all other sounds of the night. It was one of those cold nights at the end of October, when the weathercocks, shaken by the north wind, turn giddily on the high roofs, and cry with shrilly voices, 'Winter! - Winter! - Winter is come!' ("The Child Stealer")” - Erckmann-Chatrian

75. “Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.” - Hal Borland

76. “AUTUMNAL Pale amber sunlight falls across The reddening October trees, That hardly sway before a breeze As soft as summer: summer's loss Seems little, dear! on days like these. Let misty autumn be our part! The twilight of the year is sweet: Where shadow and the darkness meet Our love, a twilight of the heart Eludes a little time's deceit. Are we not better and at home In dreamful Autumn, we who deem No harvest joy is worth a dream? A little while and night shall come, A little while, then, let us dream. Beyond the pearled horizons lie Winter and night: awaiting these We garner this poor hour of ease, Until love turn from us and die Beneath the drear November trees.” - Ernest Dowson

77. “Y cuando nos separamos, es otoño en mi corazón.” - LaVyrle Spencer

78. “The bleak autumn wind was still blowing, and the solemn, surging moan of it in the wood was dreary and awful to hear through the night silence. Issac felt strangely wakeful. He resolved, as he lay down in bed, to keep the candle alight until he began to grow sleepy; for there was something unendurably depressing in the bare idea of lying awake in the darkness, listening to the dismal, ceaseless moan of the wind in the wood. ("The Dream Woman")” - Wilkie Collins

79. “Cuộc đời là một giấc mộng, và mùa thu là cõi mộng trong mơ!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

80. “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

81. “Steam rising underneath a canopy of whispering, changing aspens; starlight in the clear, dark night, and wondrous beauty in every direction. If only all could feel this way, to be so captured and enthralled with autumn.” - Donna Lynn Hope

82. “The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.” - Helen Bevington

83. “Autumn leaves under frozen soles,Hungry hands turning soft and old,My hero cried as we stood out their in the cold,Like these autumn leaves I don't have nothing to holdAutumn leaves how faded now,that smile that i've lost, well i've found some how,Because you still live on in my fathers eyes,These autumn leaves, oh these autumn leaves, oh these autumn leaves are yours tonight.” - Paolo Nutini

84. “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

85. “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