“Love not the flower they pluck and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Blight
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Blight http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/blight.htm, st. 2 <br class="br">1840s, Poems (1847)
“Love not the flower they pluck and know it not,
And all their botany is Latin names.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Blight
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer
Une jeune fille est comme une fleur qu'on a cueillie; mais la femme coupable est une fleur sur laquelle on a marché. <br class="br"> Honorine http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Honorine (1845), translated by Clara Bell
“He who travels in the Barque of Peter had better not look too closely into the engine room.”
Ronald Knox (1888–1957) English priest and theologian
Reply when asked why he did not visit Rome, quoted in Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (1977)
“He who does not love a flower, has lost all love and fear of God.”
Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) German poet, translator, editor, novelist, and critic
Wer keine Blume mehr liebt, dem ist alle Liebe und Gottesfurcht verloren. <br class="br">"Der Runenberg", from Phantasus (1812-16) http://ftp4.de.freesbie.org/pub/misc/gutenberg-de/1996/gutenb/tieck/runenbrg/runbrg3.htm; translation from Thomas Carlyle German Romance: Specimens of its Chief Authors, (London: Tait, 1827), vol. 2, p. 107.
H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author
Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)
Context: West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.
“Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.”
Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
“I fell in love with the right person, a person I know and who knows me.”
Billy Crystal (1948) American actor
Of his wife
Interview with Oprah Winfrey
“The scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.”
Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher
The Analects, Chapter I, Other chapters
Variant: A scholar who loves comfort is not worthy of the name.
Source: The Analects of Confucius