
Recalled in a letter from Joshua Speed in Herndon's Lincoln (1890), p. 527 http://books.google.com/books?id=rywOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=%22plucked+a+thistle+and+planted+a+flower%22
Posthumous attributions
1940s, Jazz (1947)
Recalled in a letter from Joshua Speed in Herndon's Lincoln (1890), p. 527 http://books.google.com/books?id=rywOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=%22plucked+a+thistle+and+planted+a+flower%22
Posthumous attributions
“When one flower blooms spring awakens everywhere”
Nobel Peace Prize Lecture (December 10, 2014)
Book VII : Modern Times, Ch. IX : The Final Consequences
Penguin Island (1908)
Context: Penguinia gloried in its wealth. Those who produced the things necessary for life, wanted them; those who did not produce them had more than enough. "But these," as a member of the Institute said, "are necessary economic fatalities." The great Penguin people had no longer either traditions, intellectual culture, or arts. The progress of civilisation manifested itself among them by murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury. Its capital assumed, as did all the great cities of the time, a cosmopolitan and financial character. An immense and regular ugliness reigned within it. The country enjoyed perfect tranquillity. It had reached its zenith.
“Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field?”
"Free Hope" p. 127.
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844)
Context: Who sees the meaning of the flower uprooted in the ploughed field? The ploughman who does not look beyond its boundaries and does not raise his eyes from the ground? No — but the poet who sees that field in its relations with the universe, and looks oftener to the sky than on the ground. Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must not be out of proportion to his waking!
Variant: He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.
Source: Mein Kampf
“Those who drown out the good singing –
there's many more of them
than those who want to hear it.”
Die daz rehte singen stoerent,
der ist ungelîche mêre
danne die ez gerne hoerent.
"Owê, hovelîchez singen", line 17; translation from Frederick Goldin German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1973) p. 127.