Quotes about flowers
page 5

“Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed - else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Life, Men, Freedom, Heart

“Three things see no end-
A flower blighted ere it bloomed,
A message that was wasted,
And a journey that was doomed.”

Mercedes Lackey book By the Sword

Source: By the Sword

“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

1890s
Source: The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)

“I HIDE myself within my flower
That wearing on your breast,
You, unsuspecting, wear me too—
And angels know the rest.

I hide myself within my flower,
That, fading from your vase,
You, unsuspecting, feel for me
Almost a loneliness…”

Emily Dickinson book The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

Angels, Feeling, Loneliness

“The frost makes a flower,
the dew makes a star.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

Source: Ariel

Star

“And over it all, the butterflies swarmed, like a million yellow-pettalled flowers dancing on swirling winds.”

Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates

Source: Deadhouse Gates

Dance

“Appreciation - Learn to give flowers while people are still living”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

People, Learning

“Some people fall head over heels. Other people begin to fall without even knowing it—love grows like a spring flower beneath last autumn’s leaves and catches them by surprise.”

Elizabeth Chandler (1954) writer

Source: Summer in the City

Love, People, Spring, Autumn

“If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Being Peace

Peaceful, Cute, Family, Peace

“Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.”

Maira Kalman (1949) Israeli American artist and creator of children's books

Books, Music, Thinking

“And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.”

Zadie Smith On Beauty

Source: On Beauty

People, World, Appearance

“Something inside me shuts down and I'm too numb to feel anything. It's like watching complete strangers in another Hunger Games. But I do notice they omit the part where I covered her in flowers.

Right. Because even that smacks of rebellion.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Hunger, Feeling, Game, Parting

“It is not the tree that forsakes the flower, but the flower that forsakes the tree.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Source: The Count of Monte Cristo

Tree

“Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word "art". If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Art

“Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.”

Anne Rice book The Vampire Lestat

Source: The Vampire Lestat

“What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.”

Martha Gellhorn (1908–1998) journalist from the United States

Pain, Tree

“Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.
No one was shallow. Not really.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: A Secret Affair

Heart

“Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower - translated from a French saying”

Alan Furst book The Spies of Warsaw

Source: The Spies of Warsaw

God

“Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Poems, 1905 1962

“Always it’s Spring)and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: 100 Selected Poems

Love, Spring

“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see - or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Hope, Reading

“A flower can't grow without rain. (Alexion)
Too much rain and it drowns. (Danger)
And yet the most beautiful of the lotus flowers are the ones that grow in the deepest mud. (Alexion)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Sins of the Night

Beauty

“God will reward you,' he said. 'You must be an angel since you care for flowers.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

God, Angels

“Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow, do you understand my pain? Are you willing to risk it all or is your love in vain?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Love, Pain, Understanding, Cooking

“I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion

Source: Pygmalion

Girl

“You know what I think? I think that if a young woman doesn't engage in the act of occasionally wishing on a star or a flower or a birthday cake full of candles, then we're forfeiting one of the sweetest whimsies of our youth.”

Robin Jones Gunn (1955) American writer

Source: On a Whim

Youth, Star, Birthday, Thinking

“A weed is but an unloved flower.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

“Look at a band like the Bravery. They're signed because we're a band," Flowers said. "I've heard rumors about [members of] that band being in a different kind of band, and how do you defend that? If you say, 'My heart really belongs to what I'm doing now,' but you used to be in a ska band. I can see the Strokes play or Franz Ferdinand play and it's real, and I haven't gotten that from the Bravery. I think people will see through them.”

Brandon Flowers (1981) American indie rock singer

"Killers' To-Do List: Lawsuit, Long-Form Video, Beef With The Bravery" (03/28/2005) from MTV.com http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1499151/20050328/killers_the.jhtml

People, Thinking, Heart

“[From Ianthe]
I am a miser
Of all thy thoughts and words, and looks and feelings—
Oh, I am jealous of a leaf, a flower,
A song, a star, if much thought on by thee!”

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

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Feeling, Star

“True we can not see God, but we can see the genius of God by works for His hands. We can see by the order of creation that a Creator must exist; reason, logic and common sense point to that conclusion. It is the epitome of foolishness to say our world with its seasons, weather patterns, trees, flowers, birds etc…was the result of some explosion in space of which our earth was a part. How can we say that the human body “just happened” with no intelligent creator behind it? The motive for saying there is no God is deeper than just ignorance.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

God, World, Intelligence, Motivation

“What is the spiritual battle? Well, the soul is a garden divided into two parts. On one half are planted thorny bushes, and on the other half flowers. We also have a water pump with two taps and two channels. The one guides the water to the thorns and the other to the flowers. I always have the choice to open one or the other tap. I leave the thorns without water and they dry up, I water the flowers and they blossom.”

Porphyrios Bairaktaris (1906–1991) Greek Saint

Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit - The Lives and Counsels of Contemporary Elders of Greece, p. 170

Soul, Water, Parting

“Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

::like a buttercup

::::upon its branching stem —

save that's green and wooden —

::I come, my sweet,

::::to sing to you.

We lived long together,

::a life filled,

::::if you will,

with flowers. So that

::I was cheered

::::when I first came to know

that there were flowers also

::in hell.

::::Today

I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers

::that we both loved,

::::even to this poor

colorless thing —

::I saw it

::::when I was a child —

little prized among the living

::but the dead see,

::::asking among themselves:

What do I remember

::that was shaped

::::as this thing is shaped?
while our eyes fill
::with tears.
::::Of love, abiding love
it will be telling
::though too weak a wash of crimson
::::colors it
to make it wholly credible.
::There is something
::::something urgent
I have to say to you
::and you alone
::::but it must wait
while I drink in
::the joy of your approach,
::::perhaps for the last time.
And so
::with fear in my heart
::::I drag it out
and keep on talking
::for I dare not stop.”

William Carlos Williams book Journey to Love

Journey to Love (1955), Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

Love, Life, Fear, Color

“Tombed in the solid night of starless space;
From nearest living orb so far removed,
That light, of all material things most swift,
Myriads on myriads of earth's years must speed,
Ere the mere outskirts of that Stygian gloom,
If ever, it might reach,-at rest eterne,
Lies the cold wreck of an extinguished sun.
Prime glory once of all heaven's radiant host;
Body, for soul of purest light most fit-
'Tween its first darkening, and eclipse complete,
Streamed years which might eternity appear;
While into ether, like the particles,
Invisible, which are the breath of flowers,
The mighty bulk its softer elements
Still ever was exhaling. As when flesh
And sinew of earth's monster Mastodon,
By the slow wasting of the elements,
All are dissolved, and hard, enduring bones
Alone remain,- even so, of this immense,-
When, by the ocean waves of centuries,
Millions succeeding millions, worn away,-
The adamantine skeleton alone,
In darkness, silence, utter solitude,
A ruin for eternity, was left.”

Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872) British writer

Israel in Egypt, Book the First (1861)

Soul, Solitude, Light, Silence

“Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour.”

Thomas Nashe (1567–1601) English Elizabethan pamphleteer and poet

Source: Summer's Last Will and Testament http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/summ1.htm (1600), lines 1588-1589.

Beauty

“Earth laughs in flowers to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but can not steer their feet
Clear of the grave.”

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

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

Boy

“Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Diary of Lady Murasaki

trans. Richard Bowring (Penguin Books, 1996)
The Diary of Lady Murasaki

Life, Beauty, Way, Home

“Yes, India is the land of the Gods par excellence… The experience of the divine presence in India is within the reach of anyone who searches even a little bit. The temples are full of flowers and offerings, and you only have to flow along with the crowd, melt into it and place yourself in the hands of the Gods. I do not advocate conversion to Hinduism, but I do recommend its inspiration. I told this to the brahmins that took me into their homes. One said, 'Establish your reawakened Paganism on a valid foundation and there'll come a day when it will catch on. It won't be long.”

Christopher Gérard (1962)

As true Pagans, they feel no need to convert anyone.
Pagan Power in Modern Europe (1999)

God, Feeling, Home, Search

“Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Flowers

Flowers, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Star

“I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're “quaint,” a polite way of saying “no TV.” They are “romantic,” i. e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're “cozy,” meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.”

Sarah Vowell book Assassination Vacation

Source: Assassination Vacation (2005), p. 2

People, Way, Understanding, Personality

“The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.”

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

Death of the Flowers http://www.bartleby.com/248/85.html (1832), st. 4, lines 23-24

“For those who labor, I propose to improve unemployment insurance, to expand minimum wage benefits, and by the repeal of section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act to make the labor laws in all our states equal to the laws of the 31 states which do not have tonight right-to-work measures. And I also intend to ask the Congress to consider measures which, without improperly invading state and local authority, will enable us effectively to deal with strikes which threaten irreparable damage to the national interest. The third path is the path of liberation. It is to use our success for the fulfillment of our lives. A great nation is one which breeds a great people. A great people flower not from wealth and power, but from a society which spurs them to the fullness of their genius. That alone is a Great Society. Yet, slowly, painfully, on the edge of victory, has come the knowledge that shared prosperity is not enough. In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome. We can subdue and we can master these forces—bring increased meaning to our lives—if all of us, government and citizens, are bold enough to change old ways, daring enough to assault new dangers, and if the dream is dear enough to call forth the limitless capacities of this great people.”

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

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, People, Law, Dreams

“The waters speak of love and the breeze and the branches and the little birds and the fish and the flowers and the grass, all together begging me always to love. But you, born in a happy hour, who call me from Heaven: by the memory of your untimely death you beg me to scorn the world and its sweet hooks.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Canzone 280, st. 3–4
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Death

Love, Death, World, Bird

“Surely, no one hoped for so many things.
Hold the flowers close to your heart;
they may someday bloom.”

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

A Song Is Born
Lyrics, I am...

Hope, Heart

“Love is just a little bit of death in the heart,
For how often can one love in certainty that love will be returned?
Giving so much love, and receiving so little of it;
Because people are fickle, or indifferent? Who knows?
During moments together as in hours apart,
I'm mindful that the moon fades, flowers wither, souls pass away…
They wander lost in the somber darkness of sorrow,
Those fools who follow the footprints of love.
Because life is an endless desert,
And love is an entangling web.
Love is just a little bit of death in the heart.”

Xuân Diệu (1916–1985) Vietnamese poet

"Love" [Yêu], 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, pp. 86–87, and in Understanding Vietnam by Neil Jamieson (University of California Press, 1995), p. 162
Variant translation by Huỳnh Sanh Thông:
To love is to die a little in the heart,
for when you love can you be sure you're loved?
You give so much, so little you get back—
the other lets you down or looks away.
Together or apart, it's still the same.
The moon turns pale, blooms fade, the soul's bereaved...
They'll lose their way amidst dark sorrowland,
those passionate fools who go in search of love.
And life will be a desert bare of joy,
and love will tie the knot that binds to grief.
To love is to die a little in the heart.

Love, Life, Death, People

“Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Hope, Spring, Drink, Thinking

“It seemed to me that I, the spirit of so many worlds, the flower of so many ages, was the Church Cosmical, fit at last to be the bride of God. But instead I was blinded and seared and struck down by terrible light.”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 163)

God, Age, World, Light

“Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.”

William Chamberlayne (poet)

Pharonida (1659), Part II, Book IV.

“The window-lights, myriads and myriads,
Bloom from the walls like climbing flowers.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"Evening: New York"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Light

“What troubles me about the “hostile workplace” category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 47

Women, Hostility

“By 2050 Egypt’s population will increase from 90 million to 138 million. The population of Nigeria will increase from 186 million to 390 million. Uganda’s population will rise from 38 million to 93 million, and Ethiopia’s from 102 to 228 million. It is János Martonyi who usually warns us – and how right he is – that projecting current trends into the future requires caution, because in history there are always events which can change their course. But as we cannot prepare for unforeseeable events in the future, common sense tells us that we must project these figures into the future, and we must prepare for them. They clearly show that the real pressure on our continent will come from Africa. Today we are talking about Syria, today we are talking about Libya; but in fact we must prepare for the population pressure coming from the region beyond Libya – and its magnitude will be far greater than anything we have experienced so far. This warns us that we must be steely in our determination. Border protection – particularly when we need to build a fence and detain people – is something which is difficult to justify in aesthetic terms, but believe me, you cannot protect the borders – and thus ourselves – with flowers and cuddly toys. We must face this fact.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/viktor-orban-s-presentation-at-the-27h-balvanyos-summer-open-university-and-student-camp, 26 July 2016

People, History, Sense, Change

“This mountain-ash, whose flower-fill'd boughs
Spread like a cloud at noon —
Whose shade is as a haunted place
For the sweet airs of June :
'Twas but a little shrub when first
I wreathed amid thy hair
Its berries, like the coral crown
That the sea-maidens wear.”

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

(20th November 1824) Constancy
The London Literary Gazette, 1824

Mountain, Sea

“And at our feet unbroken lay
The glass that had whirled us thither away:
And in the grass, among the flowers
We sat and wished all sorts of things:
O, we were wealthier than kings!
We ruled the world for several hours!

And then, it seemed, we knew not why,
All the daisies began to die.
We wished them alive again; but soon
The trees all fled up towards the moon
Like peacocks through the sunlit air:
And the butterflies flapped into silver fish;
And each wish spoiled another wish;
Till we threw the glass down in despair;
For, getting whatever you want to get,
Is like drinking tea from a fishing net.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

World, Drink, Fish, Tree

“How wonderful is Cold Mountain
Climbers are all afraid
The moon shines on clear water twinkle twinkle
Wind rustles the tall grass
Plum trees flower in the snow
Bare twisted trees have clouds for foliage
A touch of rain brings it all alive
Unless you see clearly do not approach”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Mountain, Tree, Grass, Water

“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

Yury Dombrovsky book The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

tr. Alan Myers, The Harvill Press, 1996, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 100-101 cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145 https://books.google.com/books?id=MoLCsjaQT08C&lpg=PA145&ots=ekC9_khOAS&dq=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&f=false The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975)

Men, Secret, Tree, Dead

““With a few movements of the eye, he could manifest the mountains, the ocean, the rivers, the moonlit valleys, torrential rain, the gait of the swan and the elephant, a tornado, the opening of the lotus flowers and a lot else. To see him do it was to know that he was a non-pareil”
- P. T. Narendra Menon (noted art critic and poet), 1990”

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) Indian actor

Source: Abhinaya and Netrābhinaya, P.T. Narendra Menon, Kulapati of Koodiyattam, Sruti- India's premier Music and Dance magazine, August 1990 issue (71).

Art, Mountain

“For as well as I have loved thee, mine heart will not serve me to see thee, for through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights destroyed.”

Thomas Malory book Le Morte d'Arthur

Book XXI, ch. 9
Le Morte d'Arthur (c. 1469) (first known edition 1485)

Love, Heart

“For an aggregate of sensations to have become a remembrance capable of classification in time, it must have ceased to be actual, we must have lost the sense of its infinite complexity, otherwise it would have remained present. It must, so to speak, have crystallized around a center of associations of ideas which will be a sort of label. It is only when they have lost all life that we can classify our memories in time as a botanist arranges dried flowers in his herbarium.”

Henri Poincaré book The Value of Science

Pour qu’un ensemble de sensations soit devenu un souvenir susceptible d’être classé dans le temps, il faut qu’il ait cessé d’être actuel, que nous ayons perdu le sens de son infinie complexité, sans quoi il serait resté actuel. Il faut qu’il ait pour ainsi dire cristallisé autour d’un centre d’associations d’idées qui sera comme une sorte d’étiquette. Ce n’est que quand ils auront ainsi perdu toute vie que nous pourrons classer nos souvenirs dans le temps, comme un botaniste range dans son herbier les fleurs desséchées.
Source: The Value of Science (1905), Ch. 2: The Measure of Time

Life, Idea, Sense, Memory

“So much I have learned:
the blossom that fades away,
its color unseen,
is the flower in the heart
of one who lives in this world.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 174

World, Color, Learning, Heart

“O, to have the soul bathed all day long in this thought, " as the pebble in the willow brook " until the words come like the tears, because the heart is full, and we cannot help it; to feel, in the darkest hour, that there is an unseen Spectator whose eyes rest on us like morning on the flowers; and that in the severest sorrow, we can sink into a presence full of love and sympathy, deeper than ever breathed from earth or sky or loving hearts— a presence in which all fears and anxieties melt away as ice-crystals in the warm ocean. This is heaven.”

Edward Thomson (1810–1870) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 432.

Love, Fear, Feeling, Soul

“These 100 books do not agree on everything – and that's OK too. You don't need total agreement when you're an open-hearted, decentralist, experimentalist New Ager. After the Prison and its institutions lose their hold over us, you won't even want such agreement. Within the parameters of certain life-affirming values, you'll want a hundred flowers to bloom. Synergy is all; cooperation and coordination is all.”

Mark Satin (1946) American political theorist, author, and newsletter publisher

Page 180. The phrase "100 books" refers to Satin's list of 100 great New Age political books published since 1976. The term "Prison" refers to the Prison of consciousness, the basal concept in Satin's book.
New Age Politics: Our Only Real Alternative (2015)

Life, Books, Heart

“The flowers and my love
Passed away under the rain,
While I idly looked upon them
Where is my yester-love?”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Yone Noguchi's [The Spirit of Japanese Poetry] (1914), p. 112

Love

“Flowers are Love's truest language.”

Park Benjamin, Sr. (1809–1864) American journalist

Sonnet, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Love

“MIRRORMENT
Birds are flowers flying
and flowers perched birds.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

The Really Short Poems of A. R. Ammons (1991)

Bird, Flying

“To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of heaven, is as if the grovelling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups, or basking in their sunny petals.”

Anne Brontë book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XLV : Reconciliation; Helen to Gilbert

Pleasure, Joy

“The long blue days, for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exhausted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day long into hiding. And all the sounds, meaning nothing. Then at night rest in the quiet house, there are no roads, no streets any more, you lie down by a window opening on refuge, the little sounds come that demand nothing, ordain nothing, explain nothing, propound nothing, and the short necessary night is soon ended, and the sky blue again all over the secret places where nobody ever comes, the secret places never the same, but always simple and indifferent, always mere places, sites of a stirring beyond coming and going, of a being so light and free that it is as the being of nothing.”

Samuel Beckett book Watt

Part I, p. 39
Watt (1943)

Lie, Secret, Bird, Tree

“The sun came up with no conclusions
Flowers sleepin' in their beds
The city cemetary's hummin'
I'm wide awake, its mornin”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Road To Joy
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005)

Sun

“It makes no difference abroad,
The seasons fit the same,
The mornings blossom into noons,
And split their pods of flame.

Wild-flowers kindle in the woods,
The brooks brag all the day;
No blackbird bates his jargoning
For passing Calvary.

Auto-da-fé and judgment
Are nothing to the bee;
His separation from his rose
To him seems misery.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Nature, p. 120
Collected Poems (1993)

Bee, Season

“How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

A Poet!—He Hath Put His Heart to School, l. 9 (1842).

Love, Freedom

“When Nature gives a gorgeous rose,
Or yields the simplest fern,
She writes this motto on the leaves, —
"To whom it may concern!"
And so it is the poet comes
And revels in her bowers,
And, — though another hold the land,
Is owner of the flowers.”

John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) American poet

"The Poet's License".
The Masquerade and Other Poems (1866)

Nature

“I know a lovely little flower, a flower for which I pine —
I would go gather it, but bars my heavy hours confine;
Oh, grief, when free, how easily that little flower was mine!
...
Oh, were I sinking to the grave I often ask in vain,
And welcome Death stood by to loose the wasted captive's chain —
Ah, name me the Forget-me-not, I'd wake to life again!”

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

The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1835) Versions from the German (First Series.) - 'The Lovely Little Flower' — Goethe.
Translations, From the German

Love, Life, Death, Forgetting

“Gently rising hills block the view into the distance; line the wishes and desires of the children, who enjoy the blissful moments of the present without wanting to know what lies beyond. Bushes in bloom, nourishing herbs, and sweet-smelling flowers surround the quiet clear stream in which the pure blue of the cloudless sky is reflected like the glorious image of God in the souls of the children... There is no stone to be seen here, no withered branch, no fallen leaves. The whole of nature breathes, peace, joy, innocence and life.”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's Diary entry, written Aug. 1803 at Loschwitz; as cited in Religious Symbolism in Caspar David Friedrich, by Colin J. Bailey https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m2225&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF, paper; Oct. 1988 - Edinburgh College of Art, pp. 11-12 Friedrich is describing here his first composition of the painting 'Spring', 1803 (a later version he painted in 1808, viewed and described then by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert) 1794 - 1840

Life, God, Children, Peace

“When the mind has grasped the matter, words come like flowers at the call of spring.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 17

Spring

“That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: "Go away, you bunch of boring people."”

George Harrison (1943–2001) British musician, former member of the Beatles

The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 296

People

“When Spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil.”

Reginald Heber (1783–1826) English clergyman

Hymn for Seventh Sunday after Trinity; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 746.

Spring, Painting

“Loveliest of lovely things are they,
On earth, that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.”

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

A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson http://www.4literature.net/William_Cullen_Bryant/Scene_on_the_Banks_of_the_Hudson/, st. 3 (1828)

Love

“The path which leads to the mount bf ascension does not lie among flowers; and he who travels it must climb the cold hillside, he must have his feet cut by the pointed rocks, he must faint in the dark valley, he must not seldom have his rest at midnight on the desert sand.”

Henry Giles (1809–1882) Irish minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 107.

Lie, Travel

“Let the black flower blossom as it may!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The Scarlet Letter

Source: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Chapter XIV: Hester and the Physician

“It was evening when we came to the river
With a low moon over the desert
that we had lost in the mountains, forgotten,
what with the cold and the sweating
and the ranges barring the sky.
And when we found it again,
In the dry hills down by the river,
half withered, we had
the hot winds against us. There were two palms by the landing;
The yuccas were flowering; there was
a light on the far shore, and tamarisks.
We waited a long time, in silence.
Then we heard the oars creaking
and afterwards, I remember,
the boatman called us.
We did not look back at the mountains.”

Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) American theoretical physicist and professor of physics

"Crossing" describing memories of New Mexico in Hound and Horn (June 1928)

Mountain, Light, Silence, Time

“Look at the ivy on the cold clinging wall
Look at the flowers and the green grass so tall
It's not a matter of when push comes to shove
It's just an hour on the wings of a dove.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Warm Love
Song lyrics, Hard Nose the Highway (1973)

Grass

“Ikenobo Sen'o, a master of flower arranging, once said (the remark is to be found in his Sayings): "With a spray of flowers, a bit of water, one evokes the vastness of rivers and mountains." The Japanese garden too, of course symbolizes the vastness of nature. The Western garden tends to be symmetrical, the Japanese garden asymmetrical, and this is because the asymmetrical has the greater power to symbolize multiplicity and vastness. The asymmetry, of course, rests upon a balance imposed by delicate sensibilities. Nothing is more complicated, varied, attentive to detail, than the Japanese art of landscape gardening. Thus there is the form called the dry landscape, composed entirely of rocks, in which the arrangement of stones gives expression to mountains and rivers that are not present, and even suggests the waves of the great ocean breaking in upon cliffs.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)

Art, Mountain, Nature, Water

“The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao's executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Mao Zedong', p. 457
Essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2007)

School

“Take me. I'm an ordinary player in the key of C.
And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity.
Who's gonna love you when you're looks are gone?
God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Outrageous
Song lyrics, Surprise (2006)

Love, God, Water

“From the point of view of photography, I'll smite the picture with sun rays. I'll take old stock shots and scratch them; I'll claw at them so that unknown beauty sees the light of day. I shall sculpt flowers upon the film stock.”

Isidore Isou (1925–2007) Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist

Venom and Eternity (1951), Danielle's Monologue

Beauty, Light, Sun

“His wastefulness showed most of all in the architectural projects. He built a palace, stretching from the Palatine to the Esquiline, which he called…"The Golden House". The following details will give some notion of its size and magnificence. The entrance-hall was large enough to contain a huge statue of himself, 120 feet high…Parts of the house were overlaid with gold and studded with precious stones and mother-of pearl. All the dining-rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory, the panels of which could slide back and let a rain of flowers, or of perfume from hidden sprinklers, shower upon his guests. The main dining-room was circular, and its roof revolved, day and night, in time with the sky. Sea water, or sulphur water, was always on tap in the baths. When the palace had been decorated throughout in this lavish style, Nero dedicated it, and condescended to remark: "Good, now I can at last begin to live like a human being!"”
Non in alia re tamen damnosior quam in aedificando domum a Palatio Esquilias usque fecit, quam…Auream nominavit. De cuius spatio atque cultu suffecerit haec rettulisse. Vestibulum eius fuit, in quo colossus CXX pedum staret ipsius effigie…In ceteris partibus cuncta auro lita, distincta gemmis unionumque conchis erant; cenationes laqueatae tabulis eburneis versatilibus, ut flores, fistulatis, ut unguenta desuper spargerentur; praecipua cenationum rotunda, quae perpetuo diebus ac noctibus vice mundi circumageretur; balineae marinis et albulis fluentes aquis. Eius modi domum cum absolutam dedicaret, hactenus comprobavit, ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse.

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Nero, Ch. 31

Water, Time, Parting, Housing

“The Sabbath bids us behold in His created works the glory of the Creator. And it was because He desired us to do this that Jesus bound up His precious lessons with the beauty of natural things. On the holy rest day, above all other days, we should study the messages that God has written for us in nature. We should study the Saviour's parables where He spoke them, in the fields and groves, under the open sky, among the grass and flowers. As we come close to the heart of nature, Christ makes His presence real to us, and speaks to our hearts of His peace and love.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Source: Christ's Object Lessons (1900), Ch. 1, p. 25 - 26

Love, God, Peace, Beauty

“No sun—no moon—no morn—no noon,
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day,
No warmth—no cheerfulness—no healthful ease,
No road, no street, no t' other side the way,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

No! http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=3153&poem=27392. 1830s

Health, Way, Feeling, Bird

“Did you know orchids
employ trickery to attract insects?
They spray a deceptive scent
resembling insect pheromones.
Bad flower! Bad flower!
Liar! Liar! Petals on fire!”

Sheri-D Wilson (1958) Canadian Spoken Word Poet

"Heart"
Goddess Gone Fishing for a Map of the Universe (2012)

“Like the dawn upon a dream
Slowly through the scented gloom
Crept once more the ruddy gleam
O'er the friendly nursery room.
There, before our waking eyes,
Large and ghostly, white and dim,
Dreamed the Flower that never dies,
Opening wide its rosy rim.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part IV : The End of the Quest
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

Dreams

“And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers…”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Desolation Row

Fight

“It may seem fanciful, but to me the violet is the very emblem of woman's love; it springs up in secret; it hides its perfume even when gathered; how timidly its deep blue leaves bend on their slight stem! The resemblance may be carried yet further — woman's love is but beautiful in its purity; let the hot breath of passion once sully it, and its beauty is departed — thus as the summer advances, the violet loses its fragrance; June comes, but its odours are fled — the heart too has its June; the flower may remain, but its fragrance is gone for ever.”

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

Other Gift Books

Love, Secret, Beauty, Spring

“If you have patience, then you'll also have love. Patience leads to love. If you forcefully open the petals of a bud, you won't be able to enjoy its beauty and fragrance. Only when it blossoms by following its natural course, will the beauty and fragrance of a flower unfold.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Conversation in Helsinki (2000)

Love, Beauty, Nature, Patience

“Before the ferry leaves a horse and wagon comes aboard, a brokendown springwagon loaded with flowers, driven by a little brown man with high cheekbones. Jimmy Herf walks around it; behind the drooping horse with haunches like a hatrack the little warped wagon is unexpectedly merry, stacked with pots of scarlet and pink geraniums, carnations, alyssum, forced roses, blue lobelia. A rich smell of maytime earth comes from it, of wet flowerpots and greenhouses. The driver sits hunched with his hat over his eyes. Jimmy has an impulse to ask him where he is going with all of those flowers, but he stifles it.”

John Dos Passos book Manhattan Transfer

Source: Manhattan Transfer (1925), p. 403

Horse

“A sweet content
Passing all wisdom or its fairest flower.”

Richard Henry Horne (1802–1884) English poet and critic

Orion (1843), Book iii, Canto ii.

Wisdom

“By the time I was 16, the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers at the Strasbourg School of Applied Art not only poisoned drawing for me but destroyed my taste for all artistic activity. I took refuge in poetry.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Looking, Arp, Jean; as quoted by Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 12
1960s

School, Art, Bird, Time

“The sun cakes on my desk were taken, my cakes in the refrigerator are also missing. Flower baskets sent by my friends to congratulate me on my recent promotion were trampled. My colleague lost a NT$1,000 bill that he left in his office. In a democratic society, people can express their own views to gain public support, but taking away other people's possessions without permission is not a way to make a case.”

Hsiao Chia-chi (1961) Taiwanese politician

Hsiao Chia-chi (2014) cited in " Netizens ridicule official over stolen sun cakes issue http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2014/03/26/2003586548/1" on Taipei Times, 26 March 2014

People, Way, Support, Sun

“Ahmed comes back a conqueror, but what hath he found?
The cry of the orphan is loud on his ear,
And his eye hath beheld the young bride's bitter tear,
And the friend of his youth is left dead on the plain,
And the flower of his nobles return not again.
There are crowds that are filling the air with his name;
Do ye marvel the monarch is loathing his fame?”

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

The Golden Violet - The Eastern King
The Golden Violet (1827)

Youth, Tear, Cry, Dead