59 Portent Quotes

Following is our list of the most famous portent quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational portent quotes. Hopefully, these portent quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your portent knowledge!

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Famous Portent Quotes

The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier. - Antal Szerb

The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier. — Antal Szerb

Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it. — Charles de Lint

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood. — Enoch Powell

Birds rising in flight is a sign that the enemy is lying in ambush; when the wild animals are startled and flee he is trying to take you unaware. — Sun Tzu

Jesters do oft prove prophets. - William Shakespeare

Jesters do oft prove prophets. — William Shakespeare

May Jack-o-lanterns burning bright, Of soft and golden hue, Pierce through the future's veil and show, What fate now holds for you? — Jerry Smith

Jesters do often prove prophets. — Joseph Addison

The year 1999, seventh month, [or simply "sept"] From the sky will come a great King of Terror. To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, Before and after Mars to reign by good luck. — Nostradamus

Foreknowledge is power. — Auguste Comte

Synchronistic events constitute moments in which a 'cosmic' or 'greater' meaning becomes gradually conscious in an individual; generally it is a shaking experience. — Marie-Louise von Franz

Fortune is a prize to be won. Adventure is the road to it. Chance is what may lurk in the shadows at the roadside. — O. Henry

The future has many names: For the weak, it means the unattainable. For the fearful, it means the unknown. For the courageous, it means opportunity. — Victor Hugo

Goals are a preview of future events and experiences in your life. - Mark Victor Hansen

Goals are a preview of future events and experiences in your life. — Mark Victor Hansen

These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings. — Danielle Trussoni

When Fortune means to men most good, She looks upon them with a threatening eye. — William Shakespeare

Short Portent Quotes

  • Self-parody is the first portent of age. — Larry Mcmurtry
  • Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. — Agnes De Mille
  • Oh, how portentous is prosperity! How comet-like, it threatens while it shines. — Edward Young
  • Slender certainty is better than portentous falsehood. — Leonardo da Vinci
  • I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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More Portent Quotes

There are certain events which to each man's life are as comets to the earth, seemingly strange and erratic portents; distinct from the ordinary lights which guide our course and mark our seasons, yet true to their own laws, potent in their own influences. — Bill Vaughan

Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work out salvation... Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction. — Bernard Baruch

The night ... it is filled with bestial watchmen, trammeling the extremities and the interstices of the timeless city, portents fallen, constellated deities plummeting in ash and smoke, roaming the apocryphal cities, the cities of speculation and reconstituted disorder, of insemination and incipience, swept round with the dark. — Samuel R. Delany

Always maintain the attitude of a student. If you think you've done learning, bitterness sets in, but if you have more to achieve every day, in any arena, that makes each morning's awakening full of potential and cheery portent. — Nick Offerman

As the skies appear to a man, so is his mind. Some see only clouds there; some, prodigies and portents; some rarely look up at all; their heads, like the brutes,' are directed toward Earth. Some behold there serenity, purity, beauty ineffable. The world runs to see the panorama, when there is a panorama in the sky which few go to see. — Henry David Thoreau

[Alternate translation:] The Divine Spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity. — Gottfried Leibniz

Rivers are roads that move and carry us whither we wish to go. [Fr., Les rivieres sont des chemins qui marchant et qui portent ou l'on veut aller.] — Blaise Pascal

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents. — Sherwin B. Nuland

Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world. — Agnes De Mille

The V sign is the symbol of the unconquerable will of the occupied territories, and a portent of the fate awaiting the Nazi tyranny. — Winston Churchill

They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. — Chris Cleave

In the zone of perdition where my youth went as if to complete its education, one would have said that the portents of an imminent collapse of the whole edifice of civilization had made an appointment. — Guy Debord

I remind myself that not everything is a sign, that some things simply are what they appear to be and should not be analyzed, deconstructed, or forced to bear the burden of metaphor, symbol, omen, or portent. — Diane Schoemperlen

I wouldn't have said that Anthony Eden was equipped by nature to deal with the situation in the world today. I would have said that he was portentous, sincere, honest and rather stupid. — Malcolm Muggeridge

In one sense what may pass between the pope and myself may be trivialities. In another sense the fact of talking trivialities is itself a portent of great significance. But the pleasantries which we exchange may, as one church leader said, be pleasantries about profundities. — Geoffrey Fisher

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow. — Francis Parkman

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum. — Herman Melville

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he is his deep heart conceives God to be like. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, Where is it? — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent. — Peter Conrad

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. — J. G. Ballard

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast; Is that portentous phrase, "I told you so. — Lord Byron

I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken, I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children, And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. — Bob Dylan

Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen. — Archibald MacLeish

Zombies are then a symbol of our own mad urges to destroy ourselves, and a terrifying portent that we might succeed. — Kim Paffenroth

The phantom-host has faded quite, Splendor and Terror gone-- Portent or promise--and gives way To pale, meek Dawn. — Herman Melville

There various news I heard of love and strife,Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,The fall of favourites, projects of the great,Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:All neither wholly false, nor wholly true. — Alexander Pope

.... Anon from the castle walls The crescent banner falls, And the crowd beholds instead, Like a portent in the sky, Iskander's banner fly, The Black Eagle with double head. And shouts ascend on high .....'' Long live Scanderbeg. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed...No one knows when emergencies will strike...Set your houses in order. If you have paid your debts, if you have a reserve, even though it be small, then should storms howl about your head, you will have shelter for your wife and children and peace in your hearts. That's all I have to say about it, but I wish to say it with all the emphasis of which I am capable. — Gordon B. Hinckley

When something out of the ordinary happens, it is ridiculous to say that it is a mystery or a portent of something to come... the mystery is created in (their) minds, and by waiting for disaster, it is from their very minds that it occurs. — Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists? — Ben Aaronovitch

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Veil, you see, if I vas to say something portentous like "zer dark eyes of zer mind" back home in Uberwald, zer would be a sudden crash of thunder,' said Otto. 'And if I vas to point at a castle on a towering crag and say "Yonder is . . . zer castle" a volf would be bound to howl mournfully.' He sighed. 'In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic and knows vot is expected of it. Here, alas, people just look at you in a funny vay. — Terry Pratchett

Mene mene tekel upsharin,' Jace said with a faint smile. 'You don't recognize it? It's from the Bible, vampire. The old one. That's your book, isn't it?' Just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I've memorized the Old Testament.' It's the Writing on the Wall. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." It's a portent of doom--it means the end of an empire. — Cassandra Clare

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