14 Inspirational Summer Quotes

If you hadn't heard yet, the official start of summer is here. The summer solstice occurs on Monday, June 20, and in order to help you ring in the new season, I've rounded up 14 inspirational summer quotes that are worth taking the time to read, reflect on, and share.

If you love inspiration, and if you love summer, then you're going to have a pretty awesome time making your way through this list. The beautiful thing about the changing seasons is that with the start of each new one comes a chance at a fresh beginning. I personally grew up in California, and while it's hard to complain about the amazing weather in the golden state, there's something undeniably refreshing to me about the much more obvious change of seasons in the rest of America.

This winter may have been pretty mild, but that doesn't mean we're not all anxiously awaiting the summer months and all their glory. Part of it is the warmer weather, but part of it is everything that summer represents. From the earliest summers spent as a child out of school to the long, summer nights of your youth, there's simply something special about this wonderful season that can't be replicated.

1. "Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August." — Jenny Han

2. "Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something. To lie in the grass and count the stars. To sit on a branch and study the clouds." — Regina Brett

3. "It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside." — Maud Hart Lovelace

4. "The summer night is like a perfection of thought." — Wallace Stevens

5. "In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible." — Sarah Dessen

6. "Summer has filled her veins with light and her heart is washed with noon." — C. Day Lewis

7. "In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen." — Steven Millhauser

8. "Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it." — Russell Baker

9. "The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming was in bloom and blossom. The sunlight was a benediction. The breezes were so caressingly soft and intimate on the skin as to be embarrassing." — Dan Simmons

10. "Sun is shining. Weather is sweet. Make you wanna move your dancing feet." — Bob Marley

11. "Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language." — Henry James

12. "Each solstice is a domain of experience unto itself. At the summer solstice, all is green and growing, potential coming into being, the miracle of manifestation painted large on the canvas of awareness." — Gary Zukav

13. "One must maintain a little bit of summer, even in the middle of winter." — Henry David Thoreau

14. "Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out." — Deb Caletti

Images: Dakota Roos/Unsplash