“The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.”
Source: The Cave (2000), p. 89 (Vintage 2003)
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José Saramago 138
Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in … 1922–2010Related quotes

Canto IV, stanza 1.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

“There buds the promise of celestial worth.”
The Last Day, book iii; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“I seek a form that my style cannot discover,
a bud of thought that wants to be a rose.”
Prosas Profanas y Otros Poemas (Profane Hymns and Other Poems). I Seek a Form (1896).

"The Rose" (published c. 1648). Compare: "Flower of all hue, and without thorn the rose", John Milton, Paradise Lost, book iv. line 256.; "Every rose has it's thorn", Poison, "Every Rose Has Its Thorn".
Hesperides (1648)

Address to the students of Brown University, quoted in Ida Tarbell (1904) The History of the Standard Oil Company
Context: The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it. This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God.

Étude Réaliste.
Undated