Quotes about flowers
page 10

“With these examples before you, you should aspire to nobility of character, and not only abide by what I have said, but acquaint yourself with the best things in the poets as well, and learn from the other wise men also any useful lessons they have taught. For just as we see the bee settling on all the flowers, and sipping the best from each, so also those who aspire to culture ought not to leave anything untasted, but should gather useful knowledge from every source. For hardly even with these pains can they overcome the defects of nature.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

Verses 51-52.
To Demonicus

Men, Pain, Nature, Knowledge

“One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science in the contemplations of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled wit awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 3.

Law, Intelligence, Light, Universe

“Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Death, Beauty, Dreams, Way

“If in the guise of philosophers, they [declaim speeches] with a view to their own profit and reputation, and not to improve you, that indeed is shocking. For it is as if a physician when visiting patients should disregard their treatment and their restoration to health, and should bring them flowers and courtesans and perfume.”

Dio Chrysostom (40–120) Greek philosopher

Discourse 32, J. Cohoon and H. Crosby, trans. (1940), p. 181

Health

“What relation has a 'doe' to our picture of the world? Does it make any logical, or even artistic, sense, to paint the doe as it appears to our perspective vision, or in a cubistic form because we feel the world cubistically? It feels it as a doe, and its landscape must also be 'doe'… I can paint a picture: the roe; Pisanello has painted such. I can, however, also wish to paint a picture: 'the roe feels'. How infinitely sharper an intellect must the painter have, in order to paint this! The Egyptians have done it. The rose; Manet has painted that. Who has painted the flowering rose? The Indians..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Source: 1915 - 1916, 100 Aphorisms', Franz Marc (1915), p. 445

World, Feeling, Sense, Appearance

“Death is utterly acceptable to consciousness and life. There has been endless time of numberless deaths, but neither consciousness nor life has ceased to arise. The felt quality and cycle to death has not modified the fragility of flowers, even the flowers within the human body. Therefore, one's understanding of consciousness and life must be turned to that utter, inclusive quality, that clarity and wisdom, that power and untouchable gracefulness this evidence suggests. We must cease to live in our superficial and divided way, seeking and demanding only consciousness and life in the present form we grasp, avoiding and resisting what appears to be the end of consciousness and life in death.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

The Knee of Listening

Life, Death, Wisdom, Way

“They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies
And lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailèd names of kings.”
Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos, quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.

Ausonius (310–395) poet

Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna
inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver
et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos,
quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent
fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.
"Cupido Cruciator", line 5; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 31.

Light

“… my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Afternoon Raag (1993)

Music, Wedding, Water, Singing

“What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Quoted in: Charles Altieri (1989) Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, p. 169: Talking about the movement of Impressionism.
undated quotes

Painting

“What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Garden (1650-1652)

Life, Grass, Wine

“Let the picture imitate nothing; let it nakedly present its raison d'être. We should indeed be ungrateful were we to deplore the absence of all those things flowers, or landscape, or faces whose mere reflection it might have been. Nevertheless, let us admit that the reminiscence of natural forms cannot be absolutely banished; not yet, at all events. An art cannot be raised to the level of a pure effusion at the first step.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Du Cubisme (1912)

Art, Nature

“Leaves have their time to fall,
And flowers to wither at the north-wind’s breath,
And stars to set; but all,
Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!”

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet

The Hour of Death (1824).

Death, Star, Time, Season

“That bhikkhu who has cut off passion in its entirety, like one picking a lotus, both flower and stalk, leaves this shore and the far shore as a snake leaves its old worn-out skin.
That bhikkhu who has cut off craving in its entirety, like one drying up a fast-flowing stream, leaves this shore and the far shore as a snake leaves its old worn-out skin.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

§ 2-3
Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Khuddaka Nikaya (Minor Collection), Sutta Nipata (Suttas falling down)

Passion

“Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/58/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 26

Love, Men, Beauty, Angels

“Lately I've been thinking how much I miss my lady.
Amoreena's in the cornfield brightening the daybreak,
Living like a lusty flower, running through the grass for hours,
Rolling through the hay like a puppy child.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Amoreena
Song lyrics, Tumbleweed Connection (1970)

Thinking, Grass

“Ah! love and song are but a dream,
A flower's faint shade on life's dark stream.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

All from The Vow of the Peacock (Title Poem - Introduction)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love, Life, Dreams

“The infidels have been the brave and thoughtful men; the flower of all the world; the pioneers and heralds of the blessed day of liberty and love; the generous spirits of the unworthy past; the seers and prophets of our race; the great chivalric souls, proud victors on the battlefields of thought, the creditors of all the years to be.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The Great Infidels (1881)

Love, Men, World, Soul

“Flowers for $25.00, reluctant. Wining and dining for $150.00, catastrophic. Trying to get on first base, unattainable. For everything else there's Masturbate.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

Set-enders

Wine

“As every flower fades and as all youth”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Youth

“And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Gardens
Essays (1625)

Music

“I do not ask that flowers should always spring
Beneath my feet
I know too well the poison and the sting
Of things too sweet.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Per Pacem ad Lucem".
A Chaplet of Verses (1862)

Spring

“Or say it is Pentecost: the hawthorn-tree,
set with coagulate magnified flowers of may,
blooms in a haze of light; old chalk-pits brim
with seminal verdue from the roots of time.

Landscape is like revelation; it is both
singular crystal and the remotest things.
Cloud-shadows of seasons revisit the earth,
odourless myrrh bourne by the wandering kings.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy 5.21-29.
Poetry

Tree, Light, Time, Season

“Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour,
I 've seen my fondest hopes decay;
I never loved a tree or flower
But 't was the first to fade away.
I never nurs'd a dear gazelle,
To glad me with its soft black eye,
But when it came to know me well
And love me, it was sure to die.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Lalla Rookh http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/lallarookh/index.html (1817), Part V-VIII: The Fire-Worshippers

Love, Hope, Tree, Childhood

“We were emerging from the period of war, of uniforms, of women-soldiers built like boxers. I drew women-flowers, soft shoulders, fine waists like liana and wide skirts like corolla.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Women, War

“During the years when my own daughters were pupils in this school I attended many of these gatherings, and heard many speeches made by men who stood where I stand at this moment. They said all sorts of things. I recall one speaker who said that as he looked out at the girls who were assembled to receive prizes, and to pay their last respects to their school, he felt as though he were looking over a garden of exquisite flowers. He was drunk, poor man, and it would be absurd to treat his remark as though he were speaking on oath.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

What Every Girl Should Know.
One-Half of Robertson Davies (1977)

Men, School, Girl, Daughters

“I always look at everything with the eyes of a child. I feel enthusiastic for things today fort he same reasons as I was enthusiastic about them as a child... I remember one summer morning when I was twelve years old [1888], I was with my father. We were following a road which crossed the plain from Rueil to Croissy. The whole plain was a solid field of corn and the ears stood higher than my head. I still retain today the impression of the vast expanse, spangled with flowers and filled with the drone of insects. Often, later on, I have tried to recapture, to fix firmly in my mind once again, the impression of that world around me, of the sun which burns my face and hands... Every time a see a field of corn I an reminded of that morning.”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 18-19

World, Feeling, Time, Sun

“We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

Yukio Mishima on Hagakure : The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan (1977) as translated by Kathryn Sparling, p. 105; Mishima's commentary on the sayings of Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

Life, Death, Suffering

“People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

Children, People, Age, Way

“The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.”

Galway Kinnell (1927–2014) Poet

Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1976).

Forgiveness

“You know the wild flowers suit your hair:
Place hands full of the purple bloom
Of loosestrife, glad of such soft doom,
And tender-toned narcissus there”

Edward Andrade (1887–1971) English physicist

Poem Fate and the Little Flowers

“Creature of special tastes,
you do not wait for gout and fame
to elevate you
to a luxurious jubilee chair,
but bear your triumph
over the flowering heather,
over wildernesses.
And you are guilty of nothing: neither of this,
that, nor anything..”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Waiting

“I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. I looked at the faces around me, and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colors draining fast. I had to get away from that town.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Source: Ask the Dust (1939), Chapter Eighteen

God, Color

“Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way,
Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold,
First pledge of blithesome [[May],
Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

To the Dandelion http://www.gaygardener.com/poems/gpoem072.phtml, st. 1

Children, Way

“If we ought to forget a war which has filled our land with widows and orphans; which has made stumps of men of the very flower of our youth; which has sent them on the journey of life armless, legless, maimed and mutilated; which has piled up a debt heavier than a mountain of gold, swept uncounted thousands of men into bloody graves and planted agony at a million hearthstones. I say, if this war is to be forgotten, I ask, in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Life, Men, War, Youth

“O surely this morning all sorrow is hidden,
All battle is hushed for this even at least;
And no one this noontide may hunger, unbidden
To the flowers and the singing and the joy of your feast
Where silent ye sit midst the world's tale increased.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Love is Enough (1872), Song II: Have No Thought for Tomorrow

Hunger, World, Singing, Joy

“While yesteryear I tarried
In a garden in the south,
I met a youth who carried
A rose-bud in his mouth.I gave him chase and caught him,
And would not set him free,
But held him and besought him
To give the flower to me.He smiled, and broke a petal
And laid it in my hand—
It seared like molten metal,
And here is yet the brand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Source: Collected Poems (1990), p. 69

Youth, Smile

“The lover of romance may lie in the sun, caring not for the time of day and content to watch the butterflies that cross his blue sky on the way from one flower to another. But the historian is an entomologist who must be stirring. He must catch the moths, which are his facts, in the net which is his memory, and he must fasten them upon his paper with sharp pins, which are dates.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

Don Orsino (1891)

Lie, Way, Lovers, Memory

“I sought refuge in my schoolbooks, among the flowers of Greek poetry, or the magical figures of geometry.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

“A few little flowers will spring up briefly in the dry gulley through which torrents of water pass occasionally. But it is steady streams that bring thick and needed crops. In the agriculture of the soul that has to do with nurturing attributes, flash floods are no substitute for regular irrigation.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Notwithstanding My Weakness, 1981, Deseret Book Co. (Salt Lake City, Utah), pg. 7.

Soul, Spring, Water

“When I gathered flowers
For my girl
From the top of the plum tree
The lower branches
Drenched me with dew.”

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (662–710) Japanese poet

XXII, p. 24
Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese (1976)

Girl, Tree

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Family, Sister, Water, Horse

“Amidst the early morning dew
Walking across the greenery
And in the evening that is scary
While taking a breath,
Oh, flower, I listen to your song,
Oh flower, I defeat your love.”

Kuvempu (1904–1994) Kannada novelist, poet, playwright, critic, and thinker

"The Flower", a translation of his first Kannada poem "Poovu".

/ Poet, nature lover and humanist (2004)

Love

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Women, God

“The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang — home-going. So the snow-flowers go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock-ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil. Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death’s arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit — waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at its own heaven-dealt destiny. All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast — all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity. 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

pages 439-440 ("Trees towering … into eternity" are the next-to-last lines of the documentary film " John Muir in the New World http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/john-muir-in-the-new-world/watch-the-full-documentary-film/1823/" (American Masters), produced, directed, and written by Catherine Tatge.) John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, Life, Death, Law

“I don't remember where I picked up the head — or the hollyhock. Flowers were planted among the vegetables in the garden between the house and the hills and I probably picked the hollyhock one day as I walked past. My paintings sometimes grow by pieces from what is around... I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

1970 - 1986, Some Memories of Drawings (1976)

World, Past, Painting, Housing

“In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers, red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic life—so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit—play the same part as flowers in the corn.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

“Similes, Parables and Fables” Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, § 380A
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

Life, Art, Nature, Suffering

“I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown”

Karen Blixen book Out of Africa

Out of Africa (1937)

Family, Time, Animals

“Love not! love not! ye hopeless sons of clay;
Hope’s gayest wreaths are made of earthly flowers—
Things that are made to fade and fall away,
Ere they have blossomed for a few short hours.”

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton (1808–1877) English feminist, social reformer, and author

Love not.

Love, Hope

“Even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we know it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.
There had been ogres in the past, by finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we’d know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition, too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world—even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them—the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There’d be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any the other world could hold. We’d be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.”

Clifford D. Simak book All Flesh is Grass

Source: All Flesh is Grass (1965), Chapter 17 (p. 179)

Life, World, Way, Search

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye! and what then?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (1895) edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge, p. 238

Dreams, Soul

“I'm struggling with flowering trees [in Spring 1881, shortly after his Algeria trip] and with women and children. I keep feeling regretful, all the same – I think of all the trouble I have given you for nothing, and I wonder how long you will put up with my womanish whims; and through all I keep seeing those pretty English girls [Duret invited him to visit England]. What a misfortune, always to be so undecided! But it's at the root of my character, and I'm too old to change.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, pp. 156-157 : a letter to Théodore Duret, March 1881

Women, Children, Feeling, Girl

“If the resident zoologist of Galaxy X had visited the earth 5 million years ago while making his inventory of inhabited planets in the universe, he would surely have corrected his earlier report that apes showed more promise than Old World monkeys and noted that monkeys had overcome an original disadvantage to gain domination among primates. (He will confirm this statement after his visit next year—but also add a footnote that one species from the ape bush has enjoyed an unusual and unexpected flowering, thus demanding closer monitoring.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"The Declining Empire of Apes", p. 288
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

World, Universe

“Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres.
2666: A Novel (2008)

Love, Literature, Tree, Grass

“Roll on, ye Stars! exult in youthful prime,
Mark with bright curves the printless steps of Time;
Near and more near your beamy cars approach,
And lessening orbs on lessening orbs encroach; —
Flowers of the sky! ye too to age must yield,
Frail as your silken sisters of the field!
Star after star from Heaven's high arch shall rush,
Suns sink on suns, and systems systems crush,
Headlong, extinct, to one dark center fall,
And Death and Night and Chaos mingle all!
— Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form,
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.”

Erasmus Darwin book The Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden (1791), Part i.

Death, Youth, Age, Cars

“There's no dearth of kindness
In this world of ours;
Only in our blindness
We gather thorns for flowers.”

Gerald Massey (1828–1907) British poet

There's no Dearth of Kindness, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

World

“Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley book Ode to the West Wind

St. III
Ode to the West Wind (1819)

Dreams, Sense, Sleep, Summer

“Early on, I made the mistake of wanting spiritual feelings to endure and remain romantic. Like a new couple expecting to always feel in love, I operated my faith thinking God and I were going to walk around smelling flowers. When this didn't happen, I became confused.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Love, God, Faith, Feeling

“There was an old, crazy dude who used to live a long time ago. His name was Lord Buckley. And he said, a long time ago, he said, "People: They're kinda like flowers and it's been a privilege walking in your garden."”

Robin Williams (1951–2014) American actor and stand-up comedian

My love goes with you.
Reality...What a Concept (1979)

Love, People, Time

“I was with this guy who was a plasterer, and at lunchtime he was eating a stuffed heart… I was thinking, "I'm not like these guys. I'm an artist." And I saw a bee come over to some flowers and get all the pollen out. I was looking and thinking, "How does it do that?" And then the guy who was eating the stuffed heart said, "How does that bee do that?"”

Damien Hirst (1965) artist

Beckett, Andy. "Arts: A Strange Case" http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19951112/ai_n14017521/pg_5?tag=artBody;col1, The Independent, 12 November 1995 Talking about when he worked as a builder after college

Guy, Thinking, Bee, Heart

“All these people come to see the White House and they see practically nothing that dates back before 1948. Every boy who comes here should see things that develop his sense of history. For the girls, the house should look beautiful and lived-in. They should see what a fire in the fireplace and pretty flowers can do for a house; the White House rooms should give them a sense of all that. Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to "redecorate" it -- a word I hate. It must be restored -- and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Interview with Hugh Sidey, according to Kennedy Library https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Jacqueline-Kennedy-in-the-White-House.aspx (1 September 1961)

Hate, People, Beauty, History

“T is hers to pluck the amaranthine flower
Of faith, and round the sufferer's temples bind
Wreaths that endure affliction's heaviest shower,
And do not shrink from sorrow's keenest wind.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Weak is the Will of Man.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Faith, Affliction, Suffering

“Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Under der linden an der heide, dâ unser zweier bette was, dâ mugt ir vinden schône beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. "Under der linden", line 1; translation by Raymond Oliver. http://colecizj.easyvserver.com/pgvogund.htm

Love, Tree, Grass

“The young tree of resistance in Palestine is blooming and blooms of faith and desire for freedom are flowering.
The Zionist regime is a decaying and crumbling tree that will fall with a storm. Today even the inhabitants of the occupied Palestine, especially the African and Asian settlers are living in [p]ain, poverty and discontent.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

2006, 2006 International Qods Conference address

Faith, Tree, Freedom

“I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

World, Understanding, Perfection

“the Legion of little Souls does exist, and they did become manifest in the Little Flower. True, they get on our nerves more than they edify us - precisely that awful Martin family with their pompous self-preoccupation, their insufferable family worship, a perpetual mutual admiration society - but, say what you will, such people really do have religion, in the strictest sense of the word - living contact, authentic conversation with God. They do live out of their trust in him, are honestly concerned with seeking and doing his will, they take pains about being kind to their neighbours, for his sake. Is this really not enough? To hell with all esoterics!”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God, Pain, People, Family

“Who hath not saved some trifling thing
More prized than jewels rare,
A faded flower, a broken ring,
A tress of golden hair.”

Ellen Clementine Howarth (1827–1899) American writer

'Tis but a Little Faded Flower, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 12.

“I can only look from the outside (or cut into the inside, but flesh and genes do not reveal organic totality). I am stuck with a panoply of ineluctably indirect methods - some very sophisticated to be sure. I can atomize, experiment, and infer. I can record reams of data about behaviors and responses. But if I could be a beetle or a bacillus for that one precious minute - and live to tell the tale in perfect memory - then I might truly fulfill Darwin's dictum penned into an early notebook containing the first full flowering of his evolutionary ideas during the late 1830's: "He who understands the baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke."”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Can We Truly Know Sloth and Rapacity?" pp. 376
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Behavior, Idea, Understanding, Memory

“The picture of the 'New Flower' ['Het Bloempje', 1880] is really one of those I did with much idea of having to express loveliness and youth both in human feeling and in the naturally plants of flowers, and If I may say don't you find, that I have succeed in this composition?”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

Quote from his letter, 23 March 1906, to F.W. Gusaulus in Toledo, (TMA); as cited in Jozef Israëls, 1824 – 1911, ed. Dieuwertje Dekkers; Waanders, Zwolle 1999, p. 306
This remark Israëls wrote 26 years after finishing the watercolor; probably it was a gift to the American art-critic
Quotes of Jozef Israels, after 1900

Youth, Feeling, Idea, Nature

“The heart does not talk, it is the intellect that does all the talking. All dealings are at the intellectual level. We have become like machines; our very lives have become mechanical. Life has lost its naturalness — like a garland of plastic flowers. There is no heart in life anymore. Only when hearts come together does true life blossom.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Conversation in Helsinki (2000)

Life, Nature, Heart

“Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart, how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

To Imagination (1846)

Truth, Sadness, Dreams, Nature

“No matter how much leaves are fixed face to face they always look at each other aslant, whereas all fruits end up head-on however carelessly jumbled. A bunch of flowers is a house of colored cards. A heap of fruit is a hive of colored bees.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Color, Bee, Housing

“Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value. Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Lullaby (2002)

Love, Life, Death, Hate

“Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance.”

Arthur Symons book The Symbolist Movement in Literature

Stéphane Mallarmé.
The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)

Literature, Perfection

“Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
For Love, the vine that round your base
Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
Without the asking on your cold
Unsmiling and unfrowning face.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Time And Love
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)

Love, Time

“Shine, ye stars of heaven,
On a world of pain!
See old Time destroying
All our hoarded gain;
All our sweetest flowers,
Every stately shrine,
All our hard-earned glory,
Every dream divine! Shine, ye stare of heaven,
On the rolling years!
See how Time, consoling,
Dries the saddest tears,
Bids the darkest storm-clouds
Pass in gentle rain,
While upspring in glory
Flowers and dreams again!”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

"Shining Stars".
Legends and Lyrics: A Book of Verses (1858)

Pain, World, Dreams, Star

“T'was Spring, t'was Summer, all was gay
Now Autumn bears a cloud brow
The flowers of Spring are swept way
And Summer fruits desert the bough”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

from Autumn

Way, Spring, Autumn, Summer

“If time is a fading dream
Then it would be like a flower
Even if destined to fall
It would be all the more valuable in its transience.”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Dolls
Lyrics, Rainbow

Dreams, Time

“A city is where you can sign a petition, boo the chief justice, fish off a pier, gaze at a hippopotamus, buy a flower at the corner, or get a good hamburger or a bad girl at 4 a. m. A city is where sirens make white streaks of sound in the sky and foghorns speak in dark grays. San Francisco is such a city.”

Herb Caen (1916–1997) American newspaper columnist

Caen, Herb. "A city is like San Francisco, not a faceless 'burb" http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/A-city-is-like-San-Francisco-not-a-faceless-burb-3168435.php S.F. Gate, 2010. Attributed

Justice, Girl, Fish

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Idea

“As steals the dew along the flower,
So stole thy smile on me;
I cannot tell the day, nor hour
I first loved thee!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1836-2) (Vol.47) Songs-IV.
The Monthly Magazine

Love, Smile

“Armida smiles to hear, but keeps her gaze
fixed on herself, love's labours to behold.
Her locks she braided and their wanton ways
in lovely order marshalled and controlled.
She wound the curls of her fine strands with sprays
of flowers, like enamel worked on gold,
and made the stranger rose join with her pale
breast's native lily, and composed her veil.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Ride Armida a quel dir: ma non che cesse
Dal vagheggiarsi, o da' suoi bei lavori.
Poichè intrecciò le chiome, e che ripresse
Con ordin vago i lor lascivi errori,
Torse in anella i crin minuti, e in esse,
Quasi smalto su l'or, consparse i fiori:
E nel bel sen le peregrine rose
Giunse ai nativi giglj, e 'l vel compose.
Canto XVI, stanza 23 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Love, Smile, Way

“Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers.

“Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day:
There where the ether like a diamond glows
Its petals fade away.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

“Let me end this chapter by suggesting that religion has done something for science. The latter came to full flower in its modern form in seventeenth-century Europe. Have you ever wondered why that's so? After all the ancient Greeks were pretty clever and the Chinese achieved a sophisticated culture well before we Europeans did, yet they did not hit on science as we now understand it. Quite a lot of people have thought that the missing ingredient was provided by the Christian religion. Of course, it's impossible to prove that so - we can't rerun history without Christianity and see what happens - but there's a respectable case worth considering. It runs like this.
The way Christians think about creation (and the same is true for Jews and Muslims) has four significant consequences. The first is that we expect the world to be orderly because its Creator is rational and consistent, yet God is also free to create a universe whichever way God chooses. Therefore, we can't figure it out just by thinking what the order of nature ought to be; we'll have to take a look and see. In other words, observation and experiment are indispensable. That's the bit the Greeks missed. They thought you could do it all just by cogitating. Third, because the world is God's creation, it's worthy of study. That, perhaps, was a point that the Chinese missed as they concentrated their attention on the world of humanity at the expense of the world of nature. Fourth, because the creation is not itself divine, we can prod it and investigate it without impiety. Put all these features together, and you have the intellectual setting in which science can get going.
It's certainly a historical fact that most of the pioneers of modern science were religious men. They may have had their difficulties with the Church (like Galileo) or been of an orthodox cast of mind (like Newton), but religion was important for them. They used to like to say that God had written two books for our instruction, the book of scripture and the book of nature. I think we need to try to decipher both books if we're to understand what's really happening.”

John Polkinghorne (1930) physicist and priest

page 29-30.
Quarks, Chaos & Christianity (1995)

Men, God, People, Books

“The flower and fruit of love are mine
The ant, the fieldmouse and the mole”

Stevie Smith (1902–1971) poet, novelist, illustrator, performer

"The Boat"
Selected Poems (1962)

Love

“I see again what I thought I saw the first time, when I sent forth the little book that was compared to and in fact could best be compared to “a humble little flower under the cover of the great forest””

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Preface Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 111 (From Without Authority)
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Books, Time

“I disagree with Les. We always found good cunt at the Lyceum. Friendly cunt, clean cunt, spare cunt, jeans and knicker stuffed full of nice juicy hairy cunt, handfuls of cunt, palmful grabbing the cunt by the stem, or the root – infantile memories of cunt – backrow slides – slithery oily cunt, the cunt that breathes – the cunt that’s neatly wrapped in cotton, in silk, in nylon, that announces, that speaks or thrusts, that winks that’s squeezed in a triangle of furtive cloth backed by an arse that’s creamy, springy billowy cushiony tight, knicker lined, knicker skinned, circumscribed by flowers and cotton, by views, clinging knicker, juice ridden knicker, hot knicker, wet knicker, swelling vulva knicker, witty cunt, teeth smiling the eyes biting cunt, cultured cunt, culture vulture cunt, finger biting cunt, cunt that pours, cunt that spreads itself over your soft lips, that attacks, cunt that imagines – cunt you dream about, cunt you create as a Melba, a meringue with smooth sides – remembered from school boys’ smelly first cunt, first foreign cunt, amazing cunt – cunt that’s cruel. Cunt that protects itself and makes you want it even more cunt – cunt that smells of the air, of the earth, of bakeries, of old apples, of figs, of sweat of hands of sour yeast of fresh fish cunt. So – are we going Les? We might pick up a bit of crumpet.”

Steven Berkoff East

East (1975), Scene 17

School, Smile, Dreams, Imagination

“She, though in full-blown flower of glorious beauty,
Grows cold even in the summer of her age.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Act IV, scene i.
Œdipus (1679)

Age, Beauty, Summer

“Your lips have splashed my dull house with print of flowers
My hands are crooked where they spilled over your dear
curving”

Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972) American writer and poet

"As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other"

Housing

“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1872(?), page 92
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love, Soul, Mountain, Bird

“Roses are shining in Picardy
In the hush of the silver dew;
Roses are flowering in Picardy
But there's never a rose like you.
And the roses will die with the summer time
And our roads may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy;
'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart.”

Fred Weatherly (1848–1929) English lawyer, author, lyricist and broadcaster

Song Roses of Picardy http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/rosesofpicardy.htm

Time, Heart, Summer

“Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, The Tale of Genji (1925–1933), Ch. 41: 'Mirage'

Thinking, Loss

“I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Quote of Kahlo, in her letter to Georgia O'Keeffe, 1 March 1933, from http://www.patronofthearts.com/2015/07/frida-kahlos-letter-to-georgia-okeefe/ 1925 - 1945

Sadness, Color, Way, Imagination

“Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Separation"
The Still Centre (1939)

Lie, Sun, Summer, Happiness

“What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions? … Hence the same names can be given to the homologous bones in widely different animals. We see the same great law in the construction of the mouths of insects: what can be more different than the immensely long spiral proboscis of a sphinx-moth, the curious folded one of a bee or bug, and the great jaws of a beetle?—yet all these organs, serving for such different purposes, are formed by infinitely numerous modifications of an upper lip, mandibles, and two pairs of maxillæ. Analogous laws govern the construction of the mouths and limbs of crustaceans. So it is with the flowers of plants. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XIII: "Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings: Morphology: Embryology: Rudimentary Organs", pages 434-435 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=452&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

Law, Bee, Animals, Horse