
“Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them.”
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 51.
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Samuel Rutherford 36
Scottish Reformed theologian 1600–1661Related quotes


“Imperceptible
It withers in the world,
This flower-like human heart.”
Source: Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955), p. 46

Anecdotes of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, from Anecdote 158, "Monthly Period is the Flower," p. 128.
Anecdotes of Oyasama

“We should enjoy this summer, flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one we’ll see.”

(7th June 1834) The History of the Lily
(25th October 1834) The Exile. See under Translations from the French
(1835) For Versions from the German, see under Translations from the German
The London Literary Gazette, 1833-1835

Elsie Venner (1859)
Context: You inherit your notions from a set of priests that had no wives and no children, or none to speak of, and so let their humanity die out of them. It didn't seem much to them to condemn a few thousand millions of people to purgatory or worse for a mistake of judgment. They didn't know what it was to have a child look up in their faces and say 'Father!' It will take you a hundred or two more years to get decently humanized, after so many centuries of de-humanizing celibacy.
Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter XIII: The Beginning and the End; 3. The Supreme Moment and After (p. 163)