Quotes about flowers
page 11

“As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to have been born in November, as there wasn't much inspiration for birthday party motifs. February children got hearts, May ones flowers, but what was there for me? A cake surrounded by withered leaves? November was a drab, dark and wet month, lacking even snow; its only noteworthy festival was Remembrance Day. But in adult life I discovered that November was, astrologically speaking, the month of sex, death and regeneration, and that November First was the Day of the Dead. It still wouldn't have been much good for birthday parties, but it was just fine for poetry, which tends to revolve a good deal around sex and death, with regeneration optional.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

On Writing Poetry (1995)

Life, Death, Children, Sex

“A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world.
Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann', p. 59
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

World, Art, Color, Sense

“The harder the rain, the lower the flowers in the garden bend:
I'd rather never talk again
Than to continue to pretend that this never ends.”

Aaron Weiss

C-Minor.
Brother, Sister (2006)

“A cup of wine, under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, will make three men.
The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side.
Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

"Drinking Alone by Moonlight" (月下獨酌), one of Li Bai's best-known poems, as translated by Arthur Waley in More Translations From the Chinese (1919)
Variant translation:
From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone. There was no one with me—
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three.
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow tagged me vacantly;
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring...
I sang. The moon encouraged me.
I danced. My shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew, we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk, and we lost one another.
...Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.
"Drinking Alone with the Moon" (trans. Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-hu)

Men, Way, Spring, Drink

“There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords.”

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

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 5: Through Florida Swamps and Forests, page 151

Time

“The war plan was incompetent in its rejection of the advice from military professionals and the analysis of the intelligence was incompetent in its conclusion that our soldiers would be welcomed with garlands of flowers and cheering crowds. Thus we would not need to respect the so-called Powell doctrine of overwhelming force.
There was also in Rumsfeld's planning a failure to provide security for nuclear materials, and to prevent widespread lawlessness and looting.
Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers even though they were denied the tools and the numbers they needed for their mission.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)

War, Intelligence, Failure, Parting

“Caprice
You held a wild flower in your finger -tips,
Idly you pressed it to indifferent lips,
Idly you tore its crimson leaves apart…
Alas! It was my heart You held wine-cup in your finger-tips,
Lightly you raised it to indifferent lips,
Lightly you drank and flung away the bowl…,
Alas! It was my soul. Page 153”

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Indian politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949

Her poem in [Gokak, Vinayak Krishna, The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, 1828-1965, http://books.google.com/books?id=WLE8GVsAfEMC, 1970, Sahitya Akademi, 978-81-260-1196-4, 153]
Poetry

Soul, Wine, Heart, Indifference

“Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered
By the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you
So that from our love there will be born poetry,
Which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!”

Charles Baudelaire book Les Fleurs du mal

"En toi je tomberai, végétale ambroisie,
Grain précieux jeté par l'éternel Semeur,
Pour que de notre amour naisse la poésie
Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur!"
"L'Âme du Vin" [The Soul of Wine]
Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

Love, God, Spring

“Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind. Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians… maybe one or two of 'em… were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

An American Prayer (1978)

Death, Fear, Cars, Soul

“Yeah, there was a period in the late '80s where I was working with different shaman. Myself and a friend, Beene, would take ayahuasca - but it wouldn't be in the liquid form, it would be a freeze-dried pill - and mushrooms. Some of those trips were eighteen hours long and I'll never forget, once I ended up sitting by the bush trying to ask the flowers why they didn't like me. It's like, Why can't I be your friend? I was crawling out of my skin at that time. In my twenties I was really… I was just losing my mind.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Q - May 1998.

Time, Forgetting

“When April winds
Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
Opened in airs of June her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds
And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Fountain http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16341/16341-h/16341-h.htm#page227, st. 3 (1839)

Bird, Tree

“Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat,
They stretch and spread and wink
Their ten soft buds that part and meet.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Étude Réaliste.
Undated

Parting, Sea

“Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of his unrivall'd pencil.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book VI, Winter Walk at Noon, Line 240.

“And she said…
"Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen."”

Harry Chapin (1942–1981) American musician

Flowers are Red
Song lyrics, Living Room Suite (1978)

Way

“You are like one of your bees, going from flower to flower, sampling the nectar of this and that.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

ibid
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun

Bee

“There are a thousand fanciful things
Linked round the young heart's imaginings.
In its first love-dream, a leaf or a flower
Is gifted then with a spell and a power:
A shade is an omen, a dream is a sign,
From which the maiden can well divine
Passion's whole history.”

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

Title Poem
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love, Dreams, Imagination, History

“I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

St. 1
The Cloud (1820)

Dreams, Light, Sun, Dance

“Each of the various specialists remains too closely concentrated upon his single specialism, too little awake to those of the others. Each sees clearly and seizes firmly upon one petal of the six-lobed flower of life and tears it apart from the whole.”

Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) British scientist and town planner

Patrick Geddes (1947). "Town Planning in Kapurthala. A Report to H.H. the Maharaja of Kapurthala, 1917". In: Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. Patrick Geddes in India. London: Lund Humphries. p. 26.

Life, Tear

“Work on with the intrepidity of a lion but at the same time with the tenderness of a flower.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Time

“I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that ties them together.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 12. Of Physiognomy
Essais (1595), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

(28 July 1965) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=27116. <br class="br">1960s

Men, Youth

“At break of day I feel as if I'm clasping a bouquet of smiling flowers
But the wind of time does not cease blowing
And the hours wilt like falling petals.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

As quoted in "Shattered Identities and Contested Images: Reflections of Poetry and History in 20th-Century Vietnam" by Neil Jamieson, in Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1992, p. 86

Smile, Feeling, Time

“My days – the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood – have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land – in the land of my sires – I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast.”

Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) Irish political leader

July 1812, aged 37, reflecting on the failure to secure equal rights or Catholic Emancipation for Catholics in Ireland. Quoted from Vol I, p. 185, of O'Connell, J. (ed.) The Life and Speeches of Daniel O'Connell, 2 Vols, Dublin, 1846)

Youth

“Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish… On these harsh terms the islands waited.”

James A. Michener book Hawaii

Hawaii (1959)

Men, God, Food, Waiting

“Too late I stayed,—forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours;
How noiseless falls the foot of time
That only treads on flowers.”

William Robert Spencer (1770–1834) British poet

Lines to Lady A. Hamilton, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time", William Shakespeare, All's Well that Ends Well, Act v. Scene 3.

Forgiveness, Time

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness, Smile, Art, Autumn

“How hushed and still are earth and air,
How lanquid 'neath the sun's firece ray-
Drooping and faint flowers fair,
On this hot, sultry, summer day!”

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (1829–1879) Canadian writer

from An Afternoon in July

Sun, Summer

“He burned six mounds (1 mound is 37 kilos) of sacred threads worn by Hindus after massacring them (Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He killed the Hindus who put a tilak-mark on their forehead ( Hasan, Tarikh-i-Kashmir). He burnt many of the books of the Hindus. Srivara wrote: "Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay". Srivara also recorded: "All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter." (Srivara, Zaina Rajtarangini). Sikandar drowned many Hindus in the Dal Lake (Jonraj, Kings of Kashmir). According to some sources only eleven families of Brahmins were left in Kashmir due to Sikandar's policies.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Cambridge History of India, III, p.281

Books, Family, Winter

“One day, when spring has gone and youth has fled,
The Maiden and the flowers will both be dead.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 27

Youth, Spring, Dead

“This mortal life is like a meadow where the serpent lies among the flowers and grass, and if anything we see there pleases our eyes, the result is to enlime our souls more deeply.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Questa vita terrena è quasi un prato,
che 'l serpente tra' fiori et l'erba giace;
et s'alcuna sua vista agli occhi piace,
è per lassar piú l'animo invescato.
Canzone 99, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Life, Soul, Grass

“The state flower of New Jersey is the common violet,” she explained, smirking, “the state bird is the eastern goldfinch, and the state fragrance is unrefined petroleum.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 14 (p. 319)

Bird

“Nowadays, ever since the attack on the Pentagon in 2001, the capital has been clamped down. How is this manifested? Giant planters blocking government buildings, giant planters barricading every other street. Theoretically, the concrete flowerpots are solid enough to fend off a truck bomb. And yet the effect is ridiculous, as if we believe we can protect ourselves from suicide bombers by hiding behind blooming pots of marigolds, flowers whose main defensive property is repelling rabbits.”

Sarah Vowell book Assassination Vacation

Source: Assassination Vacation (2005), pp. 23-24

Suicide

“And when she was finished they laid her in earth
Flowers growing, butterflies juggling over her…
She, so light, barely pressed the earth down
How much pain it took to make her as light as that!”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"To my mother" [Meiner Mutter] (May 1920), trans. John Willett in Poems, 1913-1956, p. 49
Poems, 1913-1956 (1976)

Pain, Light

“God is not so cruel as old men tell us: nor will God cut off the gentle soul of a man for loving a woman or a girl. Three things are loved by the whole world: women, fine weather, and good health, and girls are the fairest flower in Heaven next to God Himself.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Nid ydyw Duw mor greulon
Ag y dywaid hen ddynion.
Ni chyll Duw enaid gŵr mwyn,
Er caru gwraig na morwyn.
Tripheth a gerir drwy'r byd:
Gwraig a hinon ac iechyd.
Merch sydd decaf blodeuyn
Yn y nef ond Duw ei hun.
"Y Bardd a'r Brawd Llwyd" (The Poet and the Grey Brother), line 37; translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym (trans. Nigel Heseltine) Twenty-Five Poems (Banbury: The Piers Press, 1968) p. 42.

Love, Women, Men, God

“If any of you should die today, could you say to God, "Lord, here is my life work. Thou didst send me into life with a handful of seeds, and here is my heart, like a garden, full of flowers?"”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Life Thoughts (1858), p. 23

Life, God, Heart

“George: Gracie, those are beautiful flowers. Where did they come from?
Gracie: Don't you remember, George? You said that if I went to visit Clara Bagley in the hospital I should be sure to take her flowers. So, when she wasn't looking, I did.”

Gracie Allen (1902–1964) American actress and comedienne

Comedic routine, quoted in American Radio Networks : A History (2009) by Jim Cox, p. 144

Beauty

“The world is in his cloak -- figures peer out of its folds -- mythological figures and snakes and pigs and flowers, naked fauns and heavy-breasted sirens and horses' heads -- they sprawl on the flagstones at his feet and peep out from under his arms…”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

World, Horse

“Heaven above is softer blue
Earth around is sweeter green;
Something lives in every hue
Christless eyes have never seen
Birds with gladder songs o'erflow
Flowers with deeper beauties shine. Since I know, as now I know, I am His, and He is mine.”

George Wade Robinson (1838–1877) Irish poet

"Loved with Everlasting Love," Baptist Hymn Book (Pasalms and & Hymns Trust, London, 1962)

Beauty, Bird

“And if you say run, I'll run with you
And if you say hide, we'll hide.
Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two.
If you should fall
Into my arms
And tremble like a flower.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Let's Dance
Song lyrics, Let's Dance (1983)

Love, Heart

“A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hellAnd bad the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure

Love, Children, Dead

“My father was able to acquire a copy of the first printed edition of the Granth Saheb of Sri Garibdas soon after it was published from Baroda. He would frequently read it out to my mother and myself with his own running commentary on the lives of saints and bhaktas as they were mentioned in the sakhis and the ragas. I also sat sometimes turning the pages of this work. I hardly had the mental equipment to understand the mystic messages. But the stories of some great saints like Kabir, Nanak, Ravidas, Dadu, Namdev, Chippa, Pipa and Dhanna were very strongly impressed on my mind, as also the stories of renowned Muslim sufis like Rabiya, Mansur, Adham Sultan, Junaid, Bayazid and Shams Tabriz. These stories were to flower into an abiding satsanga (holy company) in years to come.”

Garib Das (1717–1778) Hindu Yogi

Goel, S. R. (2007). How I became a Hindu.

Understanding, Reading

“I do not believe that the present flowering of science is due in the least to a real appreciation of the beauty and intellectual discipline of the subject. It is due simply to the fact that power, wealth and prestige can only be obtained by the correct application of science.”

Derek Barton (1918–1998) English organic chemist

Derek Barton, Some Reflections on the Present Status of Organic Chemistry, in Science and Human Progress: Addresses at the Celebrations of the 50th Anniversary of the Mellon Institute (1963), 90.

Beauty, Science, Wealth

“Awake
Hindus:
Mother! The flowers of our worship have crowned thee! Parsees:
Mother! The flame of our hope shall surround you Mussulmans:
Mother! The sword of our love shall defend thee Christians:
Mother! The song of thy faith shall attend thee All creeds:
Shall not our dauntless devotion avail thee?
Harken! O Queen O! goddess, we hail thee!”

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) Indian politician, governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh from 1947 to 1949

Her poem in "The Golden Treasury of Indo-Anglian Poetry, 1828-1965", p=161
Poetry

Love, Faith, Hope

“The finest achievement of the new woman has been personal liberty. This is the foundation of civilization; and as long as any one class is watched suspiciously, even fondly guarded, and protected, so long will that class not only be weak, and treacherous, individually, but parasitic, and a collective danger to the community. Who has not heard wives commended for wheedling their husbands out of money, or joked [about] because they are hopelessly extravagant? As long as caprice and scheming are considered feminine virtues, as long as man is the only wage-earner, doling out sums of money, or scattering lavishly, so long will women be degraded, even if they are perfectly contented, and men are willing to labor to keep them in idleness!

Although individual women from pre-historic times have accomplished much, as a class they have been set aside to minister to men's comfort. But when once the higher has been tried, civilization repudiates the lower. Men have come to see that no advance can be made with one half-humanity set apart merely for the functions of sex; that children are quite liable to inherit from the mother, and should have opportunities to inherit the accumulated ability and culture and character that is produced only by intellectual and civil activity. The world has tried to move with men for dynamos, and "clinging" women impeding every step of progress, in arts, science, industry, professions, they have been a thousand years behind men because forced into seclusion. They have been over-sexed. They have naturally not been impressed with their duties to society, in its myriad needs, or with their own value as individuals.

The new woman, in the sense of the best woman, the flower of all the womanhood of past ages, has come to stay — if civilization is to endure. The sufferings of the past have but strengthened her, maternity has deepened her, education is broadening her — and she now knows that she must perfect herself if she would perfect the race, and leave her imprint upon immortality, through her offspring or her works.”

Winnifred Harper Cooley (1874–1967) American author and lecturer

The New Womanhood (New York, 1904) 31f.

Women, Men, Money, Children

“Print also created new literary forms and altered ideas of literary style. Medieval poetry was conceived for the ear, and each poem had to stand the test of recitation. In addition, medieval audiences were not always interested in the poet himself, since his work was known to them only through the interpretations of minstrels, who frequently rephrased poems to suit their own image and images. The printed page changed these conditions. Slowly, the printed poet came into a new relationship with his reader. He learned not to be so repetitive as his predecessors since a reader could be depended upon to return as often as needed to uncompromised passages. …After the flowering of dramatic poetry during the Elizabethan Age, the printed page substituted for the theater, and millions of children came to know Shakespeare only through this form.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Children, Age, Idea, Learning

“Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,
First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.”

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

Remember Thee.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sea

“I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the grave, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers - as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero.”

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Poet and journalist

The South Country (London: Dent, 1909) pp. 98-99.

Nature, Thinking, Grass

“The flower you hold in your hands was born today and is already your age.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

La flor que tienes en tus manos ha nacido hoy y ya tiene tu edad.
Voces (1943)

Age

“No life is so charming as a country one in England, and no flowers are sweeter or more lovely than the primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and violets that grow in abundance all around me here.”

Marianne North (1830–1890) English biologist and botanical artist

Recollections of a Happy Life:Being the autobiography of of Marianne North, ed. Mrs John Addington Symonds, Macmillan (1892).

Love, Life, Country

“It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh….”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Children, Spring, Birthday, Winter

“Santiago Nasar had often told me that the smell of closed-in flowers had an immediate relation to death for him.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), trans. Gregory Rabassa [Ballantine, 1984, ISBN 0-345-31002-0], p. 47

Death

“Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom will, will be nourished with its most noble juices.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 19

Death, Knowledge, Freedom

“There is a flower, a magical flower,
On which love hath laid a fairy power;
Gather it on the eve of St. John,
When the clock of the village is tolling one;
Let no look be turned, no word be said,
And lay the rose-leaves under your head;
Your sleep will be light, and pleasant your rest,
For your visions will be of the youth you love best.”

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

(28th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme X: The Eve of St. John
28th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme XI: The Emerald Ring — a Superstition see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Love, Youth, Sleep, Light

“O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never
Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers.”

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël book Corinne

Bk. 13, ch. 4, as translated by Letitia Elizabeth Landon for Isabel Hill (1833)
Corinne (1807)

Tear

“Water—the mighty, the pure, the beautiful, the unfathomable—where is thy element so glorious as it is in thine own domain, the deep seas? What an infinity of power is in the far Atlantic, the boundary of two separate worlds, apart like those of memory and of hope! or in the bright Pacific, whose tides are turned to gold by a southern sun, and in whose bosom sleep a thousand isles, each covered with the verdure, the flowers, and the fruit of Eden! But, amid all thy hereditary kingdoms, to which hast thou given beauty, as a birthright, lavishly as thou hast to thy favourite Mediterranean? The silence of a summer night is now sleeping on its bosom, where the bright stars are mirrored, as if in its depths they had another home and another heaven. A spirit, cleaving air midway between the two, might have paused to ask which was sea, and which was sky. The shadows of earth and earthly things, resting omen-like upon the waters, alone shewed which was the home and which the mirror of the celestial host.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World, Beauty, Hope, Home

“The Thames and the Mersey, the Tyne and the Wear and the Clyde
They spew slums like gravy on the banks of the poisonous tide
They washed up a pale thin girl
Alone in her ivory tower
Scratching her skin with the thorns that grow
On the stems of the wild flowers
What became of the love we knew?
We beat the swine black and blue
You and I
Me and you
What became of the love we knew?
What became of the working class?
Nike, Reebok, Adidas
Scratchcards, pitbulls, ecstasy
Hooray for the 21st Century”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"Hooray for the 21st Century"
Lyrics and poetry

Love, Girl, Swine

“All, insubstantial, doomed to pass,
As moonlight mirrored in the water
Or flowers reflected in a glass.”

Cao Xueqin book Dream of the Red Chamber

Source: Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1760), Chapter 5

Water

“In rose with petals soft as air
I bind for you the tides and fire —
the death that lives within the flower,
oh, gladly love, for you I bear.”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Poem Envoi

Love, Death

“For what is a flower but life’s expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time”

Alice Borchardt book The Dragon Queen

The Dragon Queen

Life, Passion, Time

“Poor Gauguin, 'way off there on his island! I'll wager he spends most of his time thinking of Rue Lafitte. I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home. Now if I should leave my house for more than two days…”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

"The Crime and the Punishment" (p. 48)
posthumous quotes, Degas: An Intimate Portrait' (1927)

People, Way, Feeling, Home

“Work without faith and prayer is like an artificial flower without fragrance.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

Faith

“As Phidias contrived his mechanism so that his memory could never be obliterated without the destruction of his work, so the great name of God is interwoven in the texture of all that He has made. His goodness blooms in every flower; His glory beams in every star. There is a God! The sun speaks it in his splendor by day, and the moon in her radiance by night. There is a God! Inanimate nature, from the pebble upon the beach, to the orb that shines in the vaulted sky, declares it; and animate existence, from the tiniest insect, to Gabriel before the throne. The earth is full of Him. His majesty commands the cherubim; His temple is all space; His arm is around all worlds.”

Joseph Dare (reverend) (1831–1880) Australian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 260.

God, World, Star, Nature

“It takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa. "Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature, don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed." "Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?" I ask. "It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance―people need to deceive themselves. We are preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re changing ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself."”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 8, p. 47

People, Way, Nature, Change

“I who am blind can give one hint to those who see - one admonition to those who would make full use of the gift of sight: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf to-morrow. Touch each object you want to touch as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. Make the most of every sense; glory in all the facets of pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Three Days to See (1933)

Pleasure, World, Beauty, Music

“She spoke, they were but a few hurried words —
Of the sweet flowers around, the heat, the night —
Yet were they such as the blest heart records
For many an after-moment's long delight;
They touch'd upon his spirit's inmost chords;
Though broken was the sense, the accents light,
Yet sweeter was to him that tremulous tone
Than all that eloquence were proud to own.”

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

26th August 1826) Metrical Fragments No. II. Tasso’s last interview with the Princess Leonora. (under the pen name Iole
The London Literary Gazette, 1826

Sense, Light, Heart, Night

“If my soul could get away from this so-called prison, be granted all the list of attributes generally bestowed on spirits, my first ramble on spirit wings would not be among the volcanoes of the moon. Nor should I follow the sunbeams to their sources in the sun. I should hover about the beauty of our own good star. I should not go moping among the tombs, nor around the artificial desolation of men. I should study Nature's laws in all their crossings and unions; I should follow magnetic streams to their source and follow the shores of our magnetic oceans. I should go among the rays of the aurora, and follow them to their beginnings, and study their dealings and communions with other powers and expressions of matter. And I should go to the very center of our globe and read the whole splendid page from the beginning. But my first journeys would be into the inner substance of flowers, and among the folds and mazes of Yosemite's falls. How grand to move about in the very tissue of falling columns, and in the very birthplace of their heavenly harmonies, looking outward as from windows of ever-varying transparency and staining!”

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

18 January 1870, pages 43-44
John of the Mountains, 1938

Men, Law, Beauty, Soul

“I'm reading Günther Anders' Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquity of Man).. That bit about Promethean shame impressed me.. observations about the shame of being oneself, the reluctance at stepping out of line, of being forward, of being looked at. This is entirely true to life…Yet it's just as natural to man to want to be seen, to want to be outstanding, to be regarded, as to want to hide - and both these instincts - for that's what they are - clash, often with equal force…How clearly I see the Little Flower in this light: from earliest days the focal point for her whole family, yet on the other hand sincerely desiring to be hidden, taking the veil”

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

and so wonderfully unveiled to posterity, revealed to the world, set up as an image, i.e. to be looked at!
Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

Life, World, Family, Nature

“I was your luxury. For nineteen years I have been put in your man’s world and was forbidden to touch anything and you made me think that all was going very well and that I did not have to worry about anything but putting flowers in vases. Why did you lie to me? Why did you keep me ignorant, if it was to admit to me one day that this world is cracking and that you are all powerless and to make me choose between a suicide and a murder?”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica to Hugo, Act 5, sc. 2
Dirty Hands (1948)

Lie, World, Thinking, Suicide

“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.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 41: Mirage

Thinking, Loss

“Pillowed on a lotus flower,
Gathered in a summer hour,
Rides he o'er the mountain wave
Which would be a tall ship's grave!
At his back his bow is slung,
Sugar-cane, with wild bees strung”

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

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Mountain, Bee, Summer

“If you could see what these flowers are. [Morandi's remark, circa 1917 - to the writer Raimondi from Bologna, indicating flowers in the corner of a reproduction of a painting by w:El Greco – beneath the feet of angels and saints]). No modern painter has painted flowers like these. Perhaps only Renoir”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Quote of Morandi; as cited in Morandi 1894 – 1964, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco, Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2008; p. 48
1925 - 1945

Angels, Painting

“Let’s hope that no system of theory of systems will ever eliminate the other systems – that no approach will be promoted to a dogma, and no group of scientists will become the high priests. Shouldn’t we rather let a hundred flowers bloom…?”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Weinberg (1976) cited in: Slawomir Sztaba (2010) "Economy and Sociology. The Likely Directions of Cooperation.". In: WFES. Vol 1, nr.1 2010. p. 218

Hope

“Let the children play
And sit like flowers upon thy grave
And crown with flowers,—that hardly have
A briefer blooming-tide than they.”

Francis Turner Palgrave (1824–1897) English poet and critic

"A Danish Barrow".

Children

“Meet me by moonlight alone,
And then I will tell you a tale
Must be told by the moonlight alone,
In the grove at the end of the vale!
You must promise to come, for I said
I would show the night-flowers their queen.
Nay, turn not away that sweet head,
'T is the loveliest ever was seen.”

J. Augustine Wade (1796–1845) Irish composer

Meet me by Moonlight, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Night

“For a samurai, a simple word is important no matter where he may be. By just one single word martial valor can be made apparent. In peaceful times words show one's bravery. In troubled times, too, one knows that by a single word his strength or cowardice can be seen. This single word is the flower of one's heart. It is not something said simply with one's mouth.
A warrior should not say something fainthearted even casually. He should set his mind to this beforehand. Even in trifling matters the depths of one's heart can be seen.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Hagakure (c. 1716)

Peace, Time, Heart

“As with all quantum devices, a qubit is a delicate flower. If you so much as look at it, you destroy it.”

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 21, The Qubit, Information in the quantum age, p. 187

“Thats the trouble. all i wanted was a tumble in the hay. oh, boy, i said. ill bet that cute thing is fun and games. what he doesn't know about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, i can sure teach him”

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

The Raven Warrior

Game, Boy, Bird, Tree

“…It was early spring. They bathed her in the Flower-Pure Pool,
Which warmed and smoothed the creamy-tinted crystal of her skin”

Bai Juyi (772–846) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

春寒賜浴華清池
温泉水滑洗凝脂
"A Song of Unending Sorrow"

Spring

“Beautiful things may be admired, if not loved," asserted the Tin Man. "Flowers are beautiful, for instance, but we are not inclined to marry them. Duty, on the contrary, is a bugle call to action, whether you are inclined to act, or not. In this case, I obey the bugle call of duty.”

L. Frank Baum book The Tin Woodman of Oz

The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), Ch. 2 : The Heart of the Tin Woodman
Later Oz novels

Love, Beauty

“If I love you—
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show myself off;
If I love you—
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like a wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you—
both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We share cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love—
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy,
The land beneath your feet.”

Shu Ting (1952) Chinese writer

"To the Oak Tree" [ 致橡树 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APZjf9K6KX0, Zhi xiangshu] (27 March 1977), in The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution, ed. Edward Morin, trans. Fang Dai and Dennis Ding (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), ISBN 978-0824813208, pp. 102–103.

Love, Faith, Soul, Spring

“Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), p. 332

Books, Time, Future

“Hinduism is a religion of the Earth. It honors the Earth as the Divine Mother and encourages us to honor her and help her develop her creative potentials. The deities of Hinduism permeate the world of nature. For example, Shiva is the God of the mountains, while Parvati is the mountain Goddess. Shiva dwells in high and steep rocky crags and cliff faces. Parvati rules over mountain streams, waterfalls, and mountain meadows with their many flowers.”

David Frawley (1950) American Hindu teacher

How I Became A Hindu - My Discovery Of Vedic Dharma

God, World, Religion, Mountain

“Spare me a lecture from somebody in parliament to somebody who started out delivering flowers for 25c a shot.”

Irwin Stelzer (1932) American economist and columnist

Newsnight debate (2010)

“A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

History
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Essays, First Series

World

“How beautiful, how buoyant, and glad is morning! The first sunshine on the leaves: the first wind, laden with the first breath of the flowers-that deep sigh with which they seem to waken from sleep; the first dew, untouched even by the light foot of the early hare; the first chirping of the rousing birds, as if eager to begin song and flight; all is redolent of the strength given by rest, and the joy of conscious life.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Life, Beauty, Bird, Sleep

“The Drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candlesticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense nor myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on its roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly.”

Sean O`Casey (1880–1964) Irish writer

Sunset and Evening Star (New York: Macmillan, 1954) p. 322.

Box

“But there are natural temples still for those
Eternal though dethroned Deities,
Where from green altars flowers send up their incense:
This fount is one of them.”

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

The Thessalian Fountain from The London Literary Gazette (24th January 1824) Fragments, 4th Series
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Nature

“I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIX: Monsieur's Fête

Love, Life, Sadness

“Thou canst not stir a flower / Without troubling of a star.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

The Mistress of Vision (1913).

Star

“The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20040803000924/http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20041.html Popimage interview
On comics

Art, Home, Imagination, Game

“Give me to live with Love alone
And let the world go dine and dress;
For Love hath lowly haunts…
If life's a flower, I choose my own—
'T is "love in Idleness."”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Dolce far Niente", Stanza 4, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love, Life, World

“Only a tender flower
Sent us to rear,
Only a life to love
While we are here,

Only a baby small,
Never at rest;
Small, but how dear to us
God knoweth best.”

Matthias Barr (1831–1911) British writer

Only a Baby Small

Love, Life, God, Baby

“The English mind was like the London drawing room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie-dog, has the right to doubt; least of all the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Dogs, Star, Idea, Bee

“A single grave! —the only one
In this unbroken ground,
Where yet the garden leaf and flower
Are lingering around.”

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

The Single Grave from The London Literary Gazette (29th August 1829)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“Now let us gather into one bouquet, from the King's garden, these seven fragrant flowers: Jesus the Son of God; Jesus our sin-bearer; Jesus the giver of eternal life; Jesus the keeper of our undying souls; Jesus the hearer of our prayers; Jesus the chastener who can turn crosses into crowns; and Jesus the wonder-worker who changes us into eternal likeness unto Himself! These flowers will keep sweet till heaven dawns.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 102.

Life, God, Soul, Change

“Come! for I need Thy love,
More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain;
Come like Thy Holy Dove,
And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again.”

Jones Very (1813–1880) American poet and essayist

From The Prayer

Love, Grass

“If you count the thorns, the flower disappears.”

Avner Strauss (1954) Israeli musician

The Rains, Anyhow.

“Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

This phrase was used as the title of a work published in 1931, but was originally used in Ch. LXII of A Novel of Thank You, written in 1925-1926, but not published until 1958 by the Yale University Press

Friendship

“Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Cliffrose and Bayonets", p. 26
Desert Solitaire (1968)

Love, Freedom

“Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him…
Flower and bird, two species never meant to mate. Yet at length the rose overcame her fear and from that single, forbidden union was born the red rose that Allah never intended the world to know.”

Susan Kay Phantom

Christine Daae (p. 433)
Phantom (1990)

Love, World, Fear, Bird

Quotes about flowers page 11

Quotes about flowers
page 11