Quotes about rose
page 9

Victor Villaseñor photo
William Drummond of Hawthornden photo
Neil Gaiman photo

“Do not be jealous of your sister.
Know that diamonds and roses
are as uncomfortable when they tumble from
one's lips as toads and frogs:
colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

"Instructions", first published in A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales (2000) edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Thomas Hardy photo
Muhammad bin Tughluq photo

“All sultans were keen on making slaves, but Muhammad Tughlaq became notorious for enslaving people. He appears to have outstripped even Alauddin Khalji and his reputation in this regard spread far and wide. Shihabuddin Ahmad Abbas writes about him thus:
“The Sultan never ceases to show the greatest zeal in making war upon infidels… Everyday thousands of slaves are sold at a very low price, so great is the number of prisoners”. Muhammad Tughlaq did not only enslave people during campaigns, he was also very fond of purchasing and collecting foreign and Indian slaves. According to Ibn Battuta one of the reasons of estrangement between Muhammad Tughlaq and his father Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, when Muhammad was still a prince, was his extravagance in purchasing slaves. Even as Sultan, he made extensive conquests. He subjugated the country as far as Dwarsamudra, Malabar, Kampil, Warangal, Lakhnauti, Satgaon, Sonargaon, Nagarkot and Sambhal to give only few prominent place-names. There were sixteen major rebellions in his reign which were ruthlessly suppressed. In all these conquests and rebellions, slaves were taken with great gusto. For example, in the year 1342 Halajun rose in rebellion in Lahore. He was aided by the Khokhar chief Kulchand. They were defeated. “About three hundred women of the rebels were taken captive, and sent to the fort of Gwalior where they were seen by Ibn Battutah.” Such was their influx that Ibn Battutah writes: “At (one) time there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Vazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them to me, but he was not satisfied. My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.” Iltutmish, Muhammad Tughlaq and Firoz Tughlaq sent gifts of slaves to Khalifas outside India….. Ibn Battutah’s eye-witness account of the Sultan’s gifting captured slave girls to nobles or arranging their marriages with Muslims on a large scale on the occasion of the two Ids, corroborates the statement of Abbas. Ibn Battutah writes that during the celebrations in connection with the two Ids in the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, daughters of Hindu Rajas and those of commoners, captured during the course of the year were distributed among nobles, officers and important foreign slaves. “On the fourth day men slaves are married and on the fifth slave-girls. On the sixth day men and women slaves are married off.” This was all in accordance with the Islamic law. According to it, slaves cannot many on their own without the consent of their proprietors. The marriage of an infidel couple is not dissolved by their jointly embracing the faith. In the present case the slaves were probably already converted and their marriages performed with the initiative and permission the Sultan himself were valid. Thousands of non-Muslim women were captured by the Muslims in the yearly campaigns of Firoz Tughlaq, and under him the id celebrations were held on lines similar to those of his predecessor. In short, under the Tughlaqs the inflow of women captives never ceased.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Lal, K. S. (1994). Muslim slave system in medieval India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 5 (quoting Masalik-ul-Absar, E.D., III, 580., Battutah)

Conrad Aiken photo
P.G. Wodehouse photo
George Galloway photo

“We did not suspend our democracy in our darkest hours why are we suspending it now? the fawning over Thatcher had gone too far. We have had enough of this, It has gone on too long and it has gone too far. This put the tin hat on it the idea that we should suspend a vital part of our democratic process for a party political and private funeral, Mr Churchill didn’t ask for Parliament to be silenced, for confrontations across the House to be forbidden. When our soldiers were being laid waste in the Norway debate, the House of Commons perhaps rose to its finest 20th Century moment. Nobody said: ‘Our armed forces have suffered a disaster, the House of Commons cannot meet, the clash of ideas cannot be heard, we must muffle the drums and silence ourselves The so-called Beast of Bolsover said the argument was about class and that it was "one rule for those at the top and another for those at the bottom. We are here talking about the thing that we sometimes suggest has gone away class, That's what it is, it's about class. It's about the fact that people out there have to live their lives in a different way and there's one rule for those at the top and there's another for those at the bottom. It's never changed, I wish it had, but it hasn't. So when I heard about the chain of events it seemed to grow like topseed - first of all there was going to be some sort of ceremonial funeral, and then the next thing you (Mr Speaker) tell us that the chimes of Big Ben are going to stop and then we hear about the fact that we are going to abandon Prime Minister's question time, I mean, what's it all about? That's why the people out there are angry, a lot of them.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-fawning-gone-far-1836314 George Galloway blasts cancellation of PMQs for Margret Thatchers funeral 16 April, 2013

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“There is a flower, a magical flower,
On which love hath laid a fairy power;
Gather it on the eve of St. John,
When the clock of the village is tolling one;
Let no look be turned, no word be said,
And lay the rose-leaves under your head;
Your sleep will be light, and pleasant your rest,
For your visions will be of the youth you love best.”

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

(28th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme X: The Eve of St. John
28th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme XI: The Emerald Ring — a Superstition see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Larry Andersen photo

“ROSES ARE RED. VIOLETS ARE BLUE, I'M A SCHIZOPHRENIC AND so AM I”

Larry Andersen (1953) American baseball player

He Made the saying popular on a T-Shirt he wore.
"Now Some Comic Relief" (1989)

Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

No Time like the old Time; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Sweet and lovely, sweeter than the roses in May,
And she loves me, there is nothing more I can say.”

Gus Arnheim (1897–1955) American musician

Song Sweet and Lovely

William Styron photo
Kathleen Raine photo
Renée Vivien photo

“Under the sun the summer grasses fade.
The rose, expiring after the harsh ravage
Of the heat, languishes toward the shade.
Sleep drips from the foliage.”

Renée Vivien (1877–1909) British poet who wrote in the French language

L’herbe de l’été pâlit sous le soleil.
La rose, expirant sous les âpres ravages
Des chaleurs, languit vers l’ombre, et le sommeil
Coule des feuillages.
La fraîcheur se glisse http://www.reneevivien.com/sapho.html#fraicheur (Coolness glides...), trans. Margaret Porter (1977)
Sapho http://www.reneevivien.com/sapho.html (1903)

Jacob Bronowski photo
Richard Overy photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Joaquin Miller photo
Thomas Tickell photo
Henry Van Dyke photo
Eric Holder photo
Maurice Thompson photo
Aaro Hellaakoski photo

“From his hole so wet and drenching
a pike rose up to tree to sing

when through the greyish net of clouds
first gleam of day was seen
and at the lake the lapping waves
woke up with joyous mean
the pike rose to the spruce's crone
to take a bite at reddish cone”

Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952) Finnish writer, poet, geographer and teacher

Aaro Hellaakoski, "The Pike's Song," (1927), Leevi Lehto (transl.), in: Leevi Lehto. Leevi Lehto. Finnish poetry: then and now, January 2005. Published online at upenn.edu. Accessed 20-03-2013

James K. Polk photo

“With me it is emphatically true that the presidency is "no bed of roses."”

James K. Polk (1795–1849) American politician, 11th President of the United States (in office from 1845 to 1849)

Diary entry (4 September 1847).

Alan Bennett photo

“If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

"The Pith and its Pitfalls", p. 385 (1981).
Writing Home (1994)

“This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"Cuttings (later)," ll. 1-4
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay photo

“There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.”

"Essay on Ludwig von Ranke's 'History of the Popes', in "Critical and Historical Essays", iii, (London; Longman, 7th Edn. 1952), 100-1.
Attributed

Victor Villaseñor photo
Yvette Cooper photo

“I have to say, Mr. Deputy Speaker, the Ministers are like fraudsters in the fairy tale, telling gullible Liberal Democrat MPs about the beautiful progressive clothes that the emperor is wearing, if only they are clever enough and loyal enough to see them. And desperately, we have Liberal Democrats clinging to shreds of invisible cloth, reaching deep into their Liberal and Conservative history to pretend that they can be progressive now. They are claiming that Keynes might have backed the Budget. They are calling on Beveridge for support, kidding themselves that they can call on their history and that they are following in the footsteps of great liberal Conservatives like Winston Churchill, who supported the minimum wage, but the truth is that the emperor has no clothes.
The truth is that if you look at the detail, the Budget is nastier than any brought in by Margaret Thatcher. Instead of Churchill, Keynes or the founders of the welfare state, the Liberal Democrats have signed up, with the Right Honourable Member for Chingford and his Chancellor, to cut support for the poor. It is perhaps apt that in this week of World Cup disappointments, it was actually a footballer who got it right. In 2002, after England were defeated in the World Cup by Brazil, Gareth Southgate reflected ruefully on England's performance and said:
"We were expecting Winston Churchill and instead got Iain Duncan Smith."
That is the reality for the Liberal Democrats now. With all their high hopes, they have betrayed the poor and the vulnerable, whom they stood up to defend.
[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Steve Webb) rose]
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman because I know he has a history of supporting people on low incomes and I do not know why he is betraying it now.”

Yvette Cooper (1969) British politician

During a budget response debate http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm100628/debtext/100628-0012.htm, 28 July, 2010. Link to the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtORBuxY0MU.

Christina Rossetti photo
Rubén Darío photo
Bruno Schulz photo
Thomas Lovell Beddoes photo
Simone Bittencourt de Oliveira photo
Edward Thomas photo

“If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my eldest daughter.”

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Poet and journalist

Poem If I Should Ever By Chance http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/if-i-should-ever-by-chance/

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

“The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of… faith and founded not on physical force but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel… The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to… make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed… to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the… Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development… and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles… occupies the whole of the space we are going over together.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Source: The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

Alfred Denning, Baron Denning photo
Francis Turner Palgrave photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Constantine P. Cavafy photo
Christina Rossetti photo
Kate Bush photo
Nathaniel Hawthorne photo
Frederick Douglass photo
George Gordon Byron photo
Clifford D. Simak photo
Susan Kay photo
Eino Leino photo
Gabrielle Roy photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
John Muir photo
Joan Baez photo
Orson Pratt photo

“By and by an obscure individual, a young man, rose up, and, in the midst of all Christendom, proclaimed the startling news that God had sent an angel to him;… This young man, some four years afterwards, was visited again by a holy angel.”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Edited version of Journal of Discourses 13:65-66 used to show that Pratt claimed that it was an angel rather than the Father and Son that visited Smith. Attributed to Sandra Tanner in a speech given on November 8, 1998 in Salt Lake City.
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

John Keats photo
John Milton photo
Philip K. Dick photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William Winwood Reade photo
Ernest Dowson photo

“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng”

Ernest Dowson (1867–1900) English writer

Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae.

Ray Comfort photo
Conrad Aiken photo
Luís de Camões photo

“Just like Love is yonder rose.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Com Amor a rosa,
Que tão fresca, &c.
Rondeau http://books.google.pt/books?id=OcADAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA47&dq=%22Just+like+Love+is+yonder+rose%22&hl=pt-PT&sa=X&ei=WYM1VJ7IF6W07QblrIGACA&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAzg8#v=onepage&q=%22Just%20like%20Love%20is%20yonder%20rose%22&f=false in Poems, from the Portuguese of Luis de Camoens (1803) by Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford, p. 47; original source unclear.
Attributed

Jeffrey Tucker photo
Paul Cézanne photo

“Here you are, put this somewhere, on your work table. You must always have this before your eyes... It's a new order of painting. Our Renaissance starts here... There's a pictorial truth in things. This rose and this white lead us to it by a path hitherto unknown to our sensibility..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Cezanne is referring in this quote to a photo of the painting 'Olypmpia', painted by Manet
Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 71, in: 'What I know or have seen of his life'

Georgia O'Keeffe photo
James O'Keefe photo
Nathalia Crane photo

“The world is growing gentle,
But few know what she owes
To the understanding lily
And the judgment of the rose.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

"Proposals"
Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928)

Anastacia photo
Ben Croshaw photo

“I rolled my eyes at Rose, but she returned the look with a scowl which suggested that, if we ever got out of this alive, she would have some issues to address with myself and my polaroid camera.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Articulate Jim: A Search For Something, Chapter Nine

Franz Marc photo
Ahmed Shah Durrani photo

“Next morning the sun revealed a horrid spectacle on the vast plain south of PAnipat. On the actual field of the combat thirty-one distinct heaps of the slain were counted, the number of bodies in each ranging from 500 upwards to 1000 and in four up to 1500 a rough total of 28,000. In addition to these, the ditch round the Maratha camp was full of dead bodies, partly the victims of disease and famine during the long siege and partly wounded men who had crawled out of the fighting to die there. West and south of PAnipat city, the jungle and the road in the line of MarAtha retreat were littered with the remains of those who had fallen unresisting in the relentless DurrAni pursuit or from hunger and exhaustion. Their number - probably three-fourths non-combatants and one-fourth soldiers - could not have been far short of the vast total of those slain in the battlefield. 'The hundreds who lay down wounded, perished from the severity of the cold.'….
'After the havoc of combat followed massacre in cold blood. Several hundreds of MarAthas had hidden themselves in the hostile city of PAnipat through folly or helplessness; and these were hunted out next day and put to the sword. According to one plausible account, the sons of Abdus Samad Khan and Mian Qutb received the DurrAni king's permission to avenge their father's death by an indiscriminate massacre of the MarAthas for one day, and in this way nearly nine thousand men perished; these were evidently non-combatants. The eyewitness Kashiraj Pandit thus describes the scene: 'Every Durrani soldier brought away a hundred or two of prisoners and slew them in the outskirts of their camp, crying out, When I started from our country, my mother, father, sister and wife told me to slay so may kafirs for their sake after we had gained the victory in this holy war, so that the religious merit of this act [of infidel slaying] might accrue to them. In this way, thousands of soldiers and other persons were massacred. In the Shah's camp, except the quarters of himself and his nobles, every tent had a heap of severed heads before it. One may say that it was verily doomsday for the MarAtha people.'….
The booty captured within the entrenchment was beyond calculation and the regiments of Khans [i. e. 8000 troopers of AbdAli clansmen] did not, as far as possible, allow other troops like the IrAnis and the TurAnis to share in the plunder; they took possession of everything themselves, but sold to the Indian soldiers handsome Brahman women for one tuman and good horses for two tumans each.' The Deccani prisoners, male and female reduced to slavery by the victorious army numbered 22,000, many of them being the sons and other relatives of the sardArs or middle class men. Among them 'rose-limbed slave girls' are mentioned.' Besides these 22,000 unhappy captives, some four hundred officers and 6000 men fled for refuge to ShujA-ud-daulah's camp, and were sent back to the Deccan with monetary help by that nawab, at the request of his Hindu officers. The total loss of the MarAthas after the battle is put at 50,000 horses, captured either by the AfghAn army or the villagers along the route of flight, two hundred thousand draught cattle, some thousands of camels, five hundred elephants, besides cash and jewellery. 'Every trooper of the Shah brought away ten, and sometimes twenty camels laden with money. The captured horses were beyond count but none of them was of value; they came like droves of sheep in their thousands.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.210-11

Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Alexander Pope photo

“Let opening roses knotted oaks adorn,
And liquid amber drop from every thorn.”

Autumn, line 36.
Pastorals (1709)

“I call this one "Ode to a Pigeon", Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, You Lookin' at me? YOU LOOKIN' AT ME?!”

Darby Conley (1970) American cartoonist

LozerPalooza
Bucky Katt

Omar Khayyám photo

“Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Ausonius photo

“O maid, while youth is with the rose and thee,
Pluck thou the rose: life is as swift for thee.”

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes,<br/>et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.

Ausonius (310–395) poet

Collige, virgo, rosas, dum flos novus et nova pubes,
et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum.
"De Rosis Nascentibus", line 49; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 29.

Carol Ann Duffy photo
Katherine Philips photo

“I did but see him and he disappeared,
I did but pluck the rose-bud and it fell,
A sorrow unforeseen and scarcely feared,
For ill can mortals their afflictions spell.”

Katherine Philips (1632–1664) Anglo-Welsh poet and translator

'On the Death of my First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips' (1655), as reported in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 575

Nguyễn Du photo
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham photo

“The golden sun rose from the silver wave,
And with his beams enamelled every green.”

Edward Fairfax (1580–1635) English translator

Book I, stanza 35
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600)

Francis Thompson photo

“The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.”

Francis Thompson (1859–1907) British poet

Daisy http://www.bartleby.com/103/26.html (1893), st. 10.

E.E. Cummings photo
A.E. Housman photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Edmond Rostand photo
Alfred Noyes photo
Gertrude Stein photo

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"Sacred Emily"
This statement, written in 1913 and first published in Geography and Plays, is thought to have originally been inspired by the work of the artist Sir Francis Rose; a painting of his was in her Paris drawing-room.
See also the Wikipedia article: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Nigel Rees explains the phrase thus: "The poem 'Sacred Emily' by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is well-nigh impenetrable to the average reader but somehow it has managed to give a format phrase to the language. If something is incapable of explanation, one says, for example, 'a cloud is a cloud is a cloud.' What Stein wrote, however, is frequently misunderstood. She did not say 'A rose is a rose is a rose,' as she might well have done, but 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose' (i.e. no indefinite article at the start and three not two repetitions.) The Rose in question was not a flower but an allusion to the English painter, Sir Francis Rose, 'whom she and I regarded' wrote Constantine Fitzgibbon, 'as the peer of Matisse and Picasso, and whose paintings — or at least painting — hung in her Paris drawing-room while a Gauguin was relegated to the lavatory.'" - Sayings of the Century, page 91
Geography and Plays (1922)

Clara Jessup Moore photo
Douglas William Jerrold photo

“He was so good he would pour rose-water on a toad.”

Douglas William Jerrold (1803–1857) English dramatist and writer

A charitable Man, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).