50 Fall Quotes to Celebrate the Beauty of the Season

From pumpkin-spiced-everything to hayrides and haunted houses, there is so much to love about the fall. Autumn represents change– the changing of the leaves, the start of a new school year, and maybe even the beginning of a few new resolutions. But somehow this season of change feels oh-so-familiar. Autumn represents the start of the holiday season, packed full of our nostalgic memories and traditions. And the annual shedding of the trees’ leaves holds the everlasting promise of new blooms to come.

In Persuasion, Jane Austen describes autumn as “that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.” Throughout the years, romantics, modernists, and transcendentalists alike have basked in the glory of autumn, attempting to capture the spirit of the season on paper. Like a painter’s rendering of an autumn landscape bursting with orange-gold leaves, a writer’s words help pinpoint the feelings that the season stirs in us. Here are some of our favorite fall quotes to remind of this season's particular beauty.

Beautiful Fall Quotes

“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall” – Oscar Wilde

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower” – Albert Camus

“Anyone who thinks fallen leaves are dead has never watched them dancing on a windy day.” – Shira Tamir

“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.” – George Eliot

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

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

“Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.” – Stanley Horowitz

“If a year was tucked inside of a clock, then autumn would be the magic hour” – Victoria Erickson

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.” – Emily Brontë

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

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Autumn… the year’s last, loveliest smile.” – William Cullen Bryant

“There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!” – Percy Shelley

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise.” – George Eliot

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

“The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” – John Muir

“It looked like the world was covered in a cobbler crust of brown sugar and cinnamon.” – Sarah Addison Allen

“The leaves as they spark into wild color just before they die are the world's oldest performance art, and everything we see is celebrating one last violently hued hurrah before the black and white silence of winter.” – Shauna Niequist

“The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” – J.K. Rowling

“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

“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

“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face." – John Donne

“Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring.” – Truman Capote

“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

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“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house." – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins. O autumn! O teakettle! O grace!” – Rainbow Rowell

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

“Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year.” – Henry Rollins

“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

“Our tree-lined streets are set ablaze, our kitchens filled with the smells of nostalgia: apples bubbling into sauce, roasting squash, cinnamon, nutmeg, cider, warmth itself.” – Shauna Niequist

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

“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

“It was a beautiful bright autumn day, with air like cider and a sky so blue you could drown in it.” – Diana Gabaldon

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

“I loved autumn, the one season of the year that God seemed to have put there just for the beauty of it.” – Lee Maynard

“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.” – Ernest Dowson

“I like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its leaves are a little yellow, its tone mellower, its colours richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of death. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor of the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age.” – Lin Yutang

"Use what you have, use what the world gives you. Use the first day of fall: bright flame before winter's deadness; harvest; orange, gold, amber; cool nights and the smell of fire.” – Shauna Niequist

“When you fall in love with a work of art, you’d die to meet the artist. I am a student of the galleries of Pacific sunsets, full moon rises on the ocean, the clouds from an airplane, autumn forests in Raleigh, first fallen snows. And I’m dying to meet the artist.” – Yasmin Mogahed

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

“October Country…That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay.” ­– Ray Bradbury

“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

“Two sounds of autumn are unmistakable...the hurrying rustle of crisp leaves blown along the street...by a gusty wind, and the gabble of a flock of migrating geese.” – Hal Borland

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

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

"Wild is the music of the autumnal winds amongst the faded woods." – William Wordsworth

"Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, birds and calmness, year's end and day's beginnings." – Terri Guillemets

"Everyone must take time to sit and watch the leaves turn." – Elizabeth Lawrence

"How beautifully leaves grow old! How full of light and color are their last days!" – John Burroughs

"My favorite color is October." – Unknown