“As aromatic plants bestow
No spicy fragrance while they grow;
But crush'd or trodden to the ground,
Diffuse their balmy sweets around.”

"Personal Narrative" (1739), from The Works of President Edwards (1830) Vol. I, edited by Sereno B. Dwight.

I stood tip-toe upon a little Hill; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

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.

Crossroads, Track 4, United Artists
The Way I Feel (1967)

Source: Conversation (1782), Line 443.

Untitled (1810); titled "Love's Rose" by William Michael Rossetti in Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1870)

No. 13
1790s, Discourses on Davila (1790)
Context: The world grows more enlightened. Knowledge is more equally diffused. Newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser. Titles and distinctions, ranks and orders, parade and ceremony, are all going out of fashion.
This is roundly and frequently asserted in the streets, and sometimes on theatres of higher rank. Some truth there is in it; and if the opportunity were temperately improved, to the reformation of abuses, the rectification of errors, and the dissipation of pernicious prejudices, a great advantage it might be. But, on the other hand, false inferences may be drawn from it, which may make mankind wish for the age of dragons, giants, and fairies.

Spring Scatters Far and Wide, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 53.

Quoted in People magazine, 10 November 1980 http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20077832,00.html