“And 't is my faith, that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Source: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Lines written in Early Spring.
Of Gardens
Essays (1625)
“And 't is my faith, that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Source: Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Lines written in Early Spring.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker
note, 1910; in: ' 'Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: ein Künstlerleben in Selbstzeugnissen' ', Andreas Gabelmann; Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany 2010, p. 36
the location was a baroque hunting lodge at the Moritzburg Ponds a few miles from Dresden
1905 - 1915
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(5th April 1823) Poetical Catalogue of Pictures. A Maniac visited by his Family in confinement : by Davis.
5th April 1823) April see The Vow of the Peacock (1835
The London Literary Gazette, 1823
Historia naturalis bulgarica 4: 10 - 15.
José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses
Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
Context: No one knows toward what center human things are going to gravitate in the near future, and hence the life of the world has become scandalously provisional. Everything that today is done in public and in private — even in one's inner conscience — is provisional, the only exception being certain portions of certain sciences. He will be a wise man who puts no trust in all that is proclaimed, upheld, essayed, and lauded at the present day. All that will disappear as quickly as it came. All of it, from the mania for physical sports (the mania, not the sports themselves) to political violence; from "new art" to sun-baths at idiotic fashionable watering-places. Nothing of all that has any roots; it is all pure invention, in the bad sense of the word, which makes it equivalent to fickle caprice. It is not a creation based on the solid substratum of life; it is not a genuine impulse or need. In a word, from the point of view of life it is false.
We are in presence of the contradiction of a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary. There exists today no politician who feels the inevitableness of his policy, and the more extreme his attitudes, the more frivolous, the less inspired by destiny they are. The only life with its roots fixed in earth, the only autochthonous life, is that which is made of inevitable acts. All the rest, all that it is in our power to take or to leave or to exchange for something else, is mere falsification of life. Life today is the fruit of an interregnum, of an empty space between two organizations of historical rule — that which was, that which is to be. For this reason it is essentially provisional. Men do not know what institutions to serve in truth; women do not know what type of men they in truth prefer.
The European cannot live unless embarked upon some great unifying enterprise. When this is lacking, he becomes degraded, grows slack, his soul is paralyzed. We have a commencement of this before our eyes today. The groups which up to today have been known as nations arrived about a century ago at their highest point of expansion. Nothing more can be done with them except lead them to a higher evolution. They are now mere past accumulating all around Europe, weighing it down, imprisoning it. With more vital freedom than ever, we feel that we cannot breathe the air within our nations, because it is confined air. What was before a nation open to all the winds of heaven, has turned into something provincial, an enclosing space.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
Recalled in a letter from Joshua Speed in Herndon's Lincoln (1890), p. 527 http://books.google.com/books?id=rywOAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA527&dq=%22plucked+a+thistle+and+planted+a+flower%22 <br class="br">Posthumous attributions
“Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.”
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic
“The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers.”
Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner
Japan, the Beautiful and Myself (1969)
Context: The single flower contains more brightness than a hundred flowers. The great sixteenth-century master of the tea ceremony and flower arranging, Rikyu, taught that it was wrong to use fully opened flowers. Even in the tea ceremony today the general practice is to have in the alcove of the tea room but a single flower, and that a flower in bud. In winter a special flower of winter, let us say a camellia, bearing some such name as White Jewel or Wabisuke, which might be translated literally as "Helpmate in Solitude", is chosen, a camellia remarkable among camellias for its whiteness and the smallness of its blossoms; and but a single bud is set out in the alcove. White is the cleanest of colors, it contains in itself all the other colors. And there must always be dew on the bud. The bud is moistened with a few drops of water.