Quotes about vine (109 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Remember, you are not a tree, that can live or stand alone. You are only a branch. And it is only while you abide in Christ, as the branch in the vine, that you will flourish or even live.”

Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813–1843) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 609.

Tree , Christ

“Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake.

All the vines are ripening
And the trees come into bud,
For my love's footsteps passing by
Are summoning the spring.

Rian's stars in the night
Shine more brightly over her,
The god's moon and the goddess's
Guard her with their light.

Even the birds above the lake
Are singing of my love,
And even the flowers along the shore
Are growing for her sake”

Guy Gavriel Kay (1954) Canadian author of fantasy fiction

Source: A Song for Arbonne

Love , God , Star , Spring

“I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

Youth , Light

“Red beans come from Southern country,
Few blossoms on vines when Spring comes.
For my sake please pick many of them,
They are the best symbol of true love.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"Red Beans" (相思), trans. Zi-chang Tang

Love , Spring , Country

“Tormented by spiritual thirst,
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
Appeared to meet me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
With fingers as light as a dream:
And my prophetic eyes opened
Like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
And they were filled with noise and ringing:
And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
And the flight of the angels in the heights,
And the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
And the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
And tore out my tongue,
Sinful, decitful, and given to idle talk;
with the right hand steeped in blood
He inserted the tongue of a wise serpent,
Into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
And plucked out my quivering heart,
And thrust a coal of live fire
Into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
'Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go forth over land and sea,
And set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Prophet

English translation found in New Society, Volume 8, (1966). New Society Limited. p. 413.
Also quoted by Kahn, Andrew (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, p. 84.
The Prophet (1826)

Men , God , Dreams , Angels

“A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon, a magnificent tomb, and I gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
About

Love , Fate , Children , World

“The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree, and through that bad companionship must perish with it.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings

Tree

“O mortals, from your fellows' blood abstain,
Nor taint your bodies with a food profane:
While corn, and pulse by Nature are bestow'd,
And planted orchards bend their willing load;
While labour'd gardens wholesom herbs produce,
And teeming vines afford their gen'rous juice;
Nor tardier fruits of cruder kind are lost,
But tam'd with fire, or mellow'd by the frost;
While kine to pails distended udders bring,
And bees their hony redolent of Spring;
While Earth not only can your needs supply,
But, lavish of her store, provides for luxury;
A guiltless feast administers with ease,
And without blood is prodigal to please.”
Parcite, mortales, dapibus temerare nefandis corpora! sunt fruges, sunt deducentia ramos pondere poma suo tumidaeque in vitibus uvae, sunt herbae dulces, sunt quae mitescere flamma mollirique queant; nec vobis lacteus umor eripitur, nec mella thymi redolentia florem: prodiga divitias alimentaque mitia tellus suggerit atque epulas sine caede et sanguine praebet.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Book XV, 75–82 (from Wikisource); on vegetarianism, as the following quote
Metamorphoses (Transformations)

Food , Spring , Nature , Bee

“I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Soliloquy at the tomb of Napoleon (1882); noted to have been misreported as "I would rather be the humblest peasant that ever lived … at peace with the world than be the greatest Christian that ever lived" by Billy Sunday (May 26, 1912), as reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 52-53.

Love , Children , Shoe , Autumn

“It has withstood the blows of a million years,
And will do so to the end. It was born when time did not exist,
And it grew up out of life,
It cut down evil’s strangling vines,
Like a slashing searing knife.”

Bobby Sands (1954–1981) Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army

The Rhythm of Time
Context: There’s an inner thing in every man,
Do you know this thing my friend?
It has withstood the blows of a million years,
And will do so to the end. It was born when time did not exist,
And it grew up out of life,
It cut down evil’s strangling vines,
Like a slashing searing knife.

Life , Evil , Time

“Everything - a horse, a vine - is created for some duty… For what task, then, were you yourself created?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Horse

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night

Life , Fear , Hope

“Until one comes who is mightier,
The one sprung from misery,
The one who was weak,
The one who was hunted,
The one marked with claw and vine,
The one named in secret,
The one called Jezelia.”

Mary E. Pearson book The Kiss of Deception

Source: The Kiss of Deception

Secret

“Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh.”

Patricia Highsmith book The Price of Salt

Source: The Price of Salt

Flowers , Happiness

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

Sea

“You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly… the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened… the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“I wrestled futilely, then relaxed as a vine wrapped three times around my throat and squeezed.
Right," I choked out, and shut my eyes. "I'll wait here, then.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Thin Air

Time , Waiting

“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American architect (1867-1959)

New York Times Magazine (4 October 1953) Sometimes paraphrased: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."

“turn and turn and turn again
you see the what, but not the when
remedy and wrong entwine
and so they form a single vine”

Suzanne Collins Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods

Source: Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods

“then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Color , Girl , Waiting

“No small thing, a bee's sting
When it enters the heart
Not so benign, the growing vine
When it tears stone apart”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Source: Palace of Stone

Tear , Bee , Heart

“You know how the bonds of family are, my lady… They cling as tightly as vines. And sometimes, like vines, they cling tightly enough to kill.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Family

“Compromise means to go just a little bit below what you know is right. It's just a little bit, but it's the little foxes that spoil the vine.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

“Hall: This is all nonsense [and] you're getting all hot under the collar about nothing. It's the Great British patois. All great truths begin as blasphemies, so why castigate Rooney, young tender sweet bud-on-the-vine [Wayne] Rooney. Your average ten year old can instruct you in oral and anal sex.”

Stuart Hall (1929–2014) sociologist and cultural theorist

O'Connell and Rawling swiftly interrupt.
BBC Fighting Talk (2005)

Truth , Sex

“So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine,
And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era

from Care and Disappointment, first published in Paradyse of Dainty Devices, 1576. Published by Grosart in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library, Vol. IV (1872)
Poems

Drink , Wine

“You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.”

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

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Marriage , Housing , Daughters

“Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.”

Toni Morrison book Tar Baby

Tar Baby (1981)

God , Angels

“Drink! The flies have not spoilt my vintage; the vines were dry before they came.”

Anatole France book Penguin Island

Book VIII : Future Times
Penguin Island (1908)

Drink

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Life , Men , Money , People

“Trellises for leafy vines, which will lose their foilage in the fall, should be set up over southern windows so that sunlight will penetrate into the house through the winter months.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Winter , Housing

“The gospel has been very imperfectly heard by any one to whom it has brought no other tidings than that of personal salvation. For in truth the individual is saved only when he is put into right relations to the community in which he lives, and the establishment of these right relations among men is the very work that Christ came to do. The individual gospel and the social gospel are therefore vitally related, inseparably bound together no more come to the man apart from the community, than life can come to the branch when it is separated from the vine.”

Washington Gladden (1836–1918) American pastor

Source: The Nation and the Kingdom (1909), pp. 10-11 http://books.google.com/books?id=MSg3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA10

Life , Men , Truth , Communication

“But not on that account (for I'd be wrong)
Would I advise you, ladies, to shun love,
For like a vine untended, with no strong
Support to cling to, you would be.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Non vi vieto per questo (ch'avrei torto)
Che vi lasciate amar; che senza amante
Sareste come inculta vite in orto,
Che non ha palo ove s'appoggi o piante.
Canto X, stanza 9 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Love , Support , Strong

“…the most influential journeys I have had have been with Ayahuasca, the vine from the Amazon, the combination of that and mushrooms. They give me the trots and such! It's very much a medicine woman, medicine man's journey drug, where you go inside. It's not a social thing. It's an internal experience. I experiment with things that are usually an internal experience, because that's just what excites me. And yes, it does sometimes give me visions. But my intention when I am doing it is very different than recreational. I don't do it recreationally. I do it to go do inner work, and I'm very clear before I do it what I'm searching for. That way, there's no abuse suffered and I don't rely on it. It's just one more tool that I use sometimes.”

Tori Amos (1963) American singer

Interview, 9/11/94, for Internet by Michael Pearce

Way , Search , Suffering

“The whole system of symbolism impressed on the art and the life of the Middle Ages must awaken the admiration of poets in all times. In reality, what colossal unity there is in Christian art, especially in its architecture! These Gothic cathedrals, how harmoniously they accord with the worship of which they are the temples, and how the idea of the Church reveals itself in them! Everything about them strives upwards, everything transubstantiates itself; the stone buds forth into branches and foliage, and becomes a tree; the fruit of the vine and the ears of corn become blood and flesh; the man becomes God; God becomes a pure spirit. For the poet, the Christian life of the Middle Ages is a precious and inexhaustibly fruitful field. Only through Christianity could the circumstances of life combine to form such striking contrasts, such motley sorrow, such weird beauty, that one almost fancies such things can never have had any real existence, and that it is all a vast fever-dream the fever-dream of a delirious deity. Even Nature, during this sublime epoch of the Christian religion, seemed to have put on a fantastic disguise; for oftentimes though man, absorbed in abstract subtilties, turned away from her with abhorrence, she would recall him to her with a voice so mysteriously sweet, so terrible in its tenderness, so powerfully enchanting, that unconsciously he would listen and smile, and become terrified, and even fall sick unto death.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

Religion and Philosophy in Germany, A fragment https://archive.org/stream/religionandphilo011616mbp#page/n5/mode/2up, p. 26

Life , Death , God , Age

“What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.”
Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras<br/>Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam!<br/>tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens<br/>pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis.

Ausonius Mosella

Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras
Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam!
tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens
pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis.
"Mosella", line 192; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 31.

Star , Light , Water

“Grape on the vine… why not be crushed to make wine?”

Aaron Weiss

Son of a Widow.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

Wine

“A horse at the end of the race…A dog when the hunt is over…A bee with its honey stored…And a human being after helping others. They don't make a fuss about it. They just go on to something else, as the vine looks forward to bearing fruit again in season. We should be like that. Acting almost unconsciously.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
V, 6
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

Dogs , Bee , Help , Horse

“The more congenial page of some tenth-rate poeticule worn out with failure after failure and now squat in his hole like the tailless fox, he is curled up to snarl and whimper beneath the inaccessible vine of song.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Under the Microscope (1872)

Failure

“The plant laboratories in which this wonderful and vitally essential transformation is effected are chiefly located in the leaf of the plant… the thoughtful person must regard this structure—the most ordinary green leaf of tree or shrub or vine or the tiniest blade of grass—as in some respects the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

p, 125
How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

World , Tree , Grass , Personality

“What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like…It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (2002), p. 14

Sense

“The wine of Love is music,
And the feast of Love is song:
And when Love sits down to the banquet,
Love sits long:

Sits long and rises drunken,
But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
That great, rich Vine.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part XVIII
Sunday Up the River (1865)

Love , Music , Wine , Heart

“No chance to speak, she was over me again, clinging like a wet vine, her tongue like a frightened snake's head, searching my mouth.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Search , Chance

“As preachers we are to promote Christian culture, by bringing the dead branches to the living Vine, that, grafted into it, without a rag of hum1. n righteousness between, the life of Him may enter them; and by keeping them, as far as teaching and example can do it, abiding in Him, that they may bring forth fruit.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 413.

Life , Dead

“Upon your shattered ruins where
This vine will flourish still, as rare,
As fresh, as fragrant as of old.
Love will not crumble.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Time And Love
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)

Love

“Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it--still regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as a vine to bear grapes again in season.
V, 6
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V

People , Chance

“The vine... is not the root merely, but all - root, stem, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit: and Jesus is not only that: He is soil and sunshine, air and showers, and ten thousand times more than we ever dreamed, wished for, or needed.”

James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905) Missionary in China

(J. Hudson Taylor. Dwelling in Him. Robesonia: Overseas Missionary Fellowship).

Dreams , Flowers , Time

“I'm happy in the every day Way
Among the mist and vines and caves
The wilderness is boundless
My companions are lazy white clouds
There are roads but they do not reach the world
My mind has come to rest and nothing can stir my thought
On a bed of rock I sit alone in the night
While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

World , Way , Mountain , Night

“[speaking about a Persian rug…] how modern their conception of space was! They understood it in the seventeenth century; we are only just beginning to re-understand it in the twentieth – see how they mesh the vines, the tendrils, the flowers with space and utilize these linked forms to create wholeness and radiance.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), p. 359: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher, 1947

Flowers , Understanding

“In fact, my art generally nauseated me. Often, when I wanted to set down a poem on an uncontaminated piece of paper, I′d start feeling sick and I did actually throw up in front of many drawings. I tremble all over in front of each picture-poem and before every action I would swallow a jar of pressed vine vermin. Time and again I strove for a kind of non-art, and time and again I failed, like a chimpanzee wanting to throw away a banana without peeling it. My disgust at producing art naturally atracted collectors, and ocassionaly photographers.”

Günter Brus (1938) Austrian artist

Source: Nervous Stillness on the Horizon (2006), P. 238 (2002)

Art , Feeling , Nature , Time

“Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows.”

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

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Water

“Sometimes, my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run away from this. You cannot run from it. Wherever you run, it waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there, where you have run to. It waits for you, to ambush you. It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows. You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.”

Klaus Kinski (1926–1991) German actor

Playboy interview

Thinking , Waiting , Heart , Hurt

“There was an NPR story this morning, about the indigenous peoples of Australia, which might make a good column. Apparently they want to preserve their culture, language, and religion because they're slowly disappearing, which is certainly understandable. But, for some reason, they also want more stuff — better education, housing, etc. — from the Australian government. Isn't it odd that it never occurs to such groups that maybe, just maybe, the reason their cultures are evaporating is that they get too much of that stuff already? Indeed, I'm at a loss as to how mastering algebra and biology will make aboriginal kids more likely to believe — oh, I dunno — that hallucinogenic excretions from a frog have spiritual value. And I'm at a loss as to how better clinics and hospitals will do anything but make the shamans and medicine men look more useless. And now that I think about it, that's the point I was trying to get at a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the symbiotic relationship between freedom and the hurly-burly of life. Cultures grow on the vine of tradition. These traditions are based on habits necessary for survival, and day-to-day problem solving. Wealth, technology, and medicine have the power to shatter tradition because they solve problems.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( August 15, 2001 http://web.archive.org/web/20010105/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg081501.shtml)
2000s, 2001

Life , Men , People , Education

“We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"The State of the Union," The Nation (13 September 2004)
2000s

Law , Dead

“Like the cellar-growing vine is the Christian who lives in the darkness and bondage of fear. But let him go forth, with the liberty of God, into the light of love, and he will be like the plant in the field, healthy, robust, and joyful.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 106

Love , God , Fear , Light

“Of all trees, I observe God hath chosen the vine, a low plant that creeps upon the helpful wall; of all beasts, the soft and patient lamb; of all fowls, the mild and guileless dove. Christ is the rose of the field, and the lily of the valley. When God appeared to Moses, it was not in the lofty cedar nor the sturdy oak nor the spreading palm; but in a bush, a humble, slender, abject shrub; as if He would, by these elections, check the conceited arrogance of man.”

Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 333.

God , Tree , Appearance , Help

“Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.
Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends
and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds”

Derek Walcott book Omeros

"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Omeros

God , Tree , Silence , Water

“As for me, I delight in the every day Way
Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves
Here in the wilderness I am completely free
With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever
There are roads, but they do not reach the world
Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts
On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night
While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan

World , Way , Mountain , Night

“September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.”

Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016) English poet and professor

September Song http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/september-song/.
Poetry

“I want to cry out to these young girls: Stop! Think!... For heaven's sake, don't fall down the rabbit hole of the lesbian scene. You will never escape, and your talent will wither on the vine. Your energy will be wasted and absorbed in repetition without progression. Women alone are Spenser's Bower of Bliss, enclosed, comfortable, and dangerous.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 82

Women , Girl , Thinking , Cry

“That is faith, cleaving to Christ, twining round Him with all the tendrils of our heart, as the vine does round its support.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 228.

Faith , Support , Heart , Christ

“We will worship by impromptu symbols, till the religion is framed for all Humanity. The beauty grows around us daily, the trees are now all in blossom and some of the vines; there is a Crown Imperial just in perfection, to which I paid my evening worship by the light of the fire, which reached to us, and there are flashes of lightening too. But I do not like the lightening so well as once, having been in too great danger. Yet just now a noble flash falls upon my paper, it ought to have noble thoughts to illumine, instead of these little nothings, but indeed to-night I write only to say: thou dear, dear friend, and we must must meet soon.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Letter IV to James Nathan (March 1845).
The Love Letters Of Margaret Fuller (1903)

Religion , Beauty , Tree , Light

“The outhouse was so overmodestly masked with vines and lattice that it was not concealed at all.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

“Miss de Vine: [In response to Harriet Vane's, "But you say you don't despise those who make some other person their job?"] "Far from despising them, I think they are dangerous."”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night (1936)

Thinking , Personality

“The act of the soul, in surrendering itself into the hands of Christ, forms a connecting bond between Him as the Vine and the soul as the branches, which communicates life, strength, nourishment, and beauty. In a word, with a just view of the character, and a supreme attachment to the person of Christ, the believer yields himself into His hands as a full and complete Saviour. Him he receives; upon Him he rests, and rests for time and eternity.”

Gardiner Spring (1785–1873) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 226.

Life , Beauty , Soul , Communication

“Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine -
'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

The Strange Lady, st. 6

Tree , Summer , Night

“We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love , Life , Youth , World

“At a certain point the two cigars fell at our feet in the snow and then we heard them whispering up there and moving about and then came a sigh louder than the others. When we looked up we could see nothing but the withered vine leaves and thousands of stars in the frosty sky. Nuto said "The blackguards" through his clenched teeth.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter XXIII, p. 133

Star

“What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.”

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) English metaphysical poet and politician

The Garden (1650-1652)

Life , Flowers , Grass , Wine

“[the canvas.. ] rubbing in with a handful of straw, with a rag, a scrubbing brush, a Majorcan brush for applying white, with the hand, etc.... [a drawing in a] gigantic rhythm like that of a waterfall cascading down a mountainside.... [works based on] pure signs begun in Varensgeville and finished in Palma.... [with a picture ground of] blue vitriol [a pesticide] that they use for the vines and that splashes against the walls of the farmhouse..”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

Miro describes his 'attacks' on the canvas
Quote of Miró in his 'Working notes, 1941 – 1942'; as cited in Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
1940 - 1960

Drawing

“Your tangerine of electricity is ripe and on a vine!”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. (1997)

“Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres.
2666: A Novel (2008)

Love , Flowers , Literature , Tree

“Old sundial, you stand here for Time:
For Love, the vine that round your base
Its tendrils twines, and dares to climb
And lay one flower-capped spray in grace
Without the asking on your cold
Unsmiling and unfrowning face.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Time And Love
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)

Love , Flowers , Time

“I will not bring dishonor on my sacred arms nor will I abandon my comrade wherever I shall be stationed. I will defend the rights of gods and men and will not leave my country smaller, when I die, but greater and better, so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will respect the rulers of the time duly and the existing ordinances duly and all others which may be established in the future. And if anyone seeks to destroy the ordinances I will oppose him so far as I am able by myself and with the help of all. I will honor the cults of my fathers. Witnesses to this shall be the gods Agraulus, Hestia, Enyo, Enyalius, Ares, Athena the Warrior, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone, Heracles, and the boundaries of my native land, wheat, barley, vines, olive-trees, fig-trees…”

Lycurgus (-390–-324 BC) Ancient Greek politician and orator

(The oath of the ephebi, [young men] of Athens at the age of eighteen). Speeches, Against Leocrates, 1, 77.

Men , God , Tree , Time

“Now Euxenus realized that he was attached to a lofty ideal, and asked him at what point he would begin it. Apollonius answered: "At the point at which physicians begin, for they, by purging the bowels of their patients prevent some from being ill at all, and heal others." And having said this he declined to live upon a flesh diet, on the ground that it was unclean, and also that it made the mind gross; so he partook only of dried fruits and vegetables, for he said that all the fruits of the earth are clean. And of wine he said that it was a clean drink because it is yielded to men by so well-domesticated a plant as the vine; but he declared that it endangered the mental balance and system and darkened, as with mud, the ether which is in the soul. After then having thus purged his interior, he took to walking without shoes by way of adornment and clad himself in linen raiment, declining to wear any animal product.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 1, § 8.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Men , Shoe , Way , Soul

“Fill every beaker up, my men, pour forth the cheering wine:
There’s life and strength in every drop,—thanksgiving to the vine!”

Albert Gorton Greene (1802–1868) American judge

The Baron's last Banquet, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life , Men , Wine

“Your hands tremble as they caress and woo me…
My amber body, harmonious and young,
Is like a jasmin vine deliciously high-strung
Drunk with sunlight, with pleasure and perfume!”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

As tuas mãos tacteiam-me a tremer...
Meu corpo de âmbar, harmonioso e moço
É como um jasmineiro em alvoroço
Ébrio de sol, de aroma, de prazer!
Quoted in Florbela Espanca (1984), p. 13
Translated by John D. Godinho
The Flowering Heath (1931), "Toledo"

Pleasure

“Faith is the vital artery of the soul. When we begin to believe, we begin to love. Faith grafts the soul into Christ, as the scion into the stock, and fetches all its nutriment from the blessed Vine.”

Richard Watson (1781–1833) British methodist theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 228.

Love , Faith , Soul , Christ

“Ah read her diary on her sheets,
Scrutinizin' every lil' piece of dirt,
Tore out a page'n'stufft it inside my shirt.
Fled outa the window,
And shinning it down the vine,
Outa her night-mare, and back into mine.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, From Her to Eternity (1984), From Her to Eternity

Reading , Night

“If I love you—
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show myself off;
If I love you—
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like a wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you—
both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We share cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love—
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy,
The land beneath your feet.”

Shu Ting (1952) Chinese writer

"To the Oak Tree" [ 致橡树 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APZjf9K6KX0, Zhi xiangshu] (27 March 1977), in The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry Since the Cultural Revolution, ed. Edward Morin, trans. Fang Dai and Dennis Ding (University of Hawaii Press, 1990), ISBN 978-0824813208, pp. 102–103.

Love , Faith , Soul , Spring

“Happiness, in truth, may not be the fruit plucked by my action yet without action all fruit will die on the vine.
I will act now.
I will act now. I will act now. I will act now.”

Og Mandino book The Greatest Salesman in the World

Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 16 : The Scroll Marked IX, p. 95.

Truth , Happiness

“A vine bears three grapes, the first of pleasure, the second of drunkenness, and the third of repentance.”

Anacharsis Scythian philosopher

As quoted in Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Chapter "Life of Anacharsis", 1702 edition, John Nicholson, p. 55.
Source: [Diogenes Laërtius, Diogenes_Laërtius, The Lives of the Ancient Philosophers: Containing an Account of Their Several Fects, Doctrines, Actions and Remarkable Sayings..., http://books.google.com/books?id=SQrULxU3TXMC, 4 September 2013, 1702, John Nicholson, 54, Life of Anarchasis]

Pleasure

“The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe.”

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 15, p. 192

Tree

“The shade fell darker from the clustering vine,
Whose green boughs twined the lattice like a wreath;
The lark had ceased the musical glad laugh
With which he hails the morning; note by note
The matin song had died upon the wind;
The dew which hung upon the cypresses
Had turned to sunshine on the waving leaves;”

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

(14th February 1829) Lines on Newton’s Picture of the Disconsolate
The London Literary Gazette, 1829

Music

“Now, everything Marx did was intentionally anti-Christian. If the Bible is for it, he's against it. See, the Bible makes private property a real serious issue. Ownership of private property is critical. You can't have freedom without property rights. What good does it do to say that you have all kinds of freedom if there's no place to exercise your freedom? […] You could not possibly lose your property permanently in the Biblical system. Since every man has his own vine and his own fig tree, drink waters out of your own cistern, waters out of your own well. Private property is essential. […] Karl Marx developed the idea of a graduated income tax. The more you make, the more they take. That's Karl Marx's idea. He's said, "You need to abolish rights of inheritance." The Bible says a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children. Karl Marx was against that. Confiscate property rights. Evolution is a foundation of Communist philosophy behind the money powers. Karl Marx said, "We need a central bank." This was a Communist idea. The banking system we're using today in America, the Federal Reserve, is a direct result of Karl Marx's thinking. There is nothing Federal about it. It's private bankers that run our currency. The Bible says, "The love of money is the root of all evil". All evil.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

Love , Money , Children , Exercises

“The wood is decked in light green leaf.
The swallow twitters in delight.
The lonely vine sheds joyous tears
Of interwoven dew and light. Spring weaves a gown of green to clad
The mountain height and wide-spread field.
O when wilt thou, my native land,
In all thy glory stand revealed?”

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) Georgian poet and politician; a saint of Georgian Orthodox Church

Spring, p. 61
Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948)

Mountain , Spring , Tear , Light

“Back he'll come…With vine leaves in his hair. Flushed and confident.”

Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet

Hedda, Act II
Hedda Gabler (1890)

Confidence

“I am told that your mother is a religious woman, a widow of many years' standing; and that when you were a child she reared and taught you herself. Afterwards when you had spent some time in the flourishing schools of Gaul she sent you to Rome, sparing no expense and consoling herself for your absence by the thought of the future that lay before you. She hoped to see the exuberance and glitter of your Gallic eloquence toned down by Roman sobriety, for she saw that you required the rein more than the spur. So we are told of the greatest orators of Greece that they seasoned the bombast of Asia with the salt of Athens and pruned their vines when they grew too fast. For they wished to fill the wine-press of eloquence not with the tendrils of mere words but with the rich grape-juice of good sense.”
Audio religiosam habere te matrem, multorum annorum viduam, quae aluit, quae erudivit infantem et post studia Galliarum, quae vel florentissima sunt, misit Romam non parcens sumptibus et absentiam filii spe sustinens futurorum, ut ubertatem Gallici nitoremque sermonis gravitas Romana condiret nec calcaribus in te sed frenis uteretur, quod et in disertissimis viris Graeciae legimus, qui Asianum tumorem Attico siccabat sale et luxuriantes flagellis vineas falcibus reprimebant, ut eloquentiae toreularia non verborum pampinis, sed sensuum quasi uvarum expressionibus redundarent.

Jerome (345–420) Catholic saint and Doctor of the Church

Letter 125 (Ad Rusticum Monachum)
Letters

School , Hope , Sense , Wine

“The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

Pleasure

“We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter http://www.infomotions.com/etexts/literature/american/1700-1799/franklin-paris-247.txt to Abbé Morellet (1779).
Epistles
Context: We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy. The miracle in question was only performed to hasten the operation, under circumstances of present necessity, which required it.

Love , God , Marriage , Water

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run”

John Keats To Autumn

"To Autumn", st. 1
Poems (1820)
Context: Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the ground, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Sun , Season

“And my clay-coloured motherlessness rangily reclines;
come on home now!
All my bones are dolorous with vines!”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Ys (2006)
Context: And everything with wings is restless,
aimless, drunk and dour;
butterflies and birds collide, at hot ungodly hours.
And my clay-coloured motherlessness rangily reclines;
come on home now!
All my bones are dolorous with vines!

Home

“My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.”

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet

The Pardon
Context: My dog lay dead five days without a grave
In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine
And a jungle of grass and honey-suckle vine.
I who had loved him while he kept alive
Went only close enough to where he was
To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell
Twined with another odor heavier still
And hear the flies' intolerable buzz.

Dogs , Grass , Summer , Dead

“I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that We Shall overcome!”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

(This contains an allusion to the book of Isaiah Chapter 11, verse 6
1960s, Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1964)
Context: I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that We Shall overcome!'

God , War , Lie , Tree

“This is the dream we had, asleep in our chair, thinking of Christmas in the lands of fir tree and pine, Christmas in lands of palm tree and vine, and of how the one great sky does for all places and all people.”

E. B. White (1899–1985) American writer

The Wild Flag (1943)
Context: This is the dream we had, asleep in our chair, thinking of Christmas in the lands of fir tree and pine, Christmas in lands of palm tree and vine, and of how the one great sky does for all places and all people.
After the third great war was over (this was a curious dream), there was no more than a handful of people left alive, and the earth was in ruins and the ruins were horrible to behold. The people, the survivors, decided to meet to talk over their problem and to make a lasting peace, which is the customary thing to make after a long and exhausting war. There were eighty-three countries, and each country sent a delegate to the convention. One English-man came, one Peruvian, one Ethiopian, one Frenchman, one Japanese, and so on, until every country was represented.

People , Dreams , Thinking , Tree

“You think you hold the core and kernel
Of all the world beneath your crust,
Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
Love is eternal.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Time And Love
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)
Context: Dropt tears have hastened your decay
And brought you one step nigher death;
And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved,
The music of Love's golden breath
And seen the light in eyes that loved.
You think you hold the core and kernel
Of all the world beneath your crust,
Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
Love is eternal.

Love , Lie , World , Thinking

“All the Law, the prophets, and the gospel are fulfilled, when there is in Christ a new creature, having life in and from him, as really as the branch has its life in and from the vine.”

William Law (1686–1761) English cleric, nonjuror and theological writer

¶ 129 - 130.
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761)
Context: What is the difference between man's own righteousness and man's own light in religion? They are strictly the same thing, do one and the same work, namely, keep up and strengthen every evil, vanity, and corruption of fallen nature. Nothing saves a man from his own righteousness, but that which saves and delivers him from his own light. The Jew that was most of all set against the gospel, and unable to receive it was he that trusted in his own righteousness; this was the rich man, to whom it was as hard to enter into the kingdom of heaven as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. But the Christian, that trusts in his own light, is the very Jew that trusted in his own righteousness; and all that he gets by the gospel, is only that which the Pharisee got by the Law, namely, to be further from entering into the kingdom of God than publicans and harlots. … Nothing but God in man can be a godly life in man. Hence is that of the apostle, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." But you will say, can this be true of the spiritual divine letter of the gospel? Can it kill, or give death? Yes, it kills, when it is rested in; when it is taken for divine power, and supposed to have goodness in itself; for then it kills the Spirit of God in man, quenches his holy fire within us, and is set up instead of it. It gives death, when it is built into systems of strife and contention about words, notions, and opinions, and makes the kingdom of God to consist, not in power, but in words. When it is thus used, then of necessity it kills, because it keeps from that which alone is life and can give life. … All the Law, the prophets, and the gospel are fulfilled, when there is in Christ a new creature, having life in and from him, as really as the branch has its life in and from the vine. And when all scripture is thus understood, and all that either Christ says of himself, or his apostles say of him, are all heard, or read, only as one and the same call to come to Christ, in hunger and thirst to be filled and blessed with his divine nature made living within us; then, and then only, the letter kills not, but as a sure guide leads directly to life. But grammar, logic, and criticism knowing nothing of scripture but its words, bring forth nothing but their own wisdom of words, and a religion of wrangle, hatred, and contention, about the meaning of them.
But lamentable as this is, the letter of scripture has been so long the usurped province of school-critics, and learned reasoners making their markets of it, that the difference between literal, notional, and living divine knowledge, is almost quite lost in the Christian world. So that if any awakened souls are here or there found among Christians, who think that more must be known of God, of Christ, and the powers of the world to come, than every scholar can know by reading the letter of scripture, immediately the cry of enthusiasm, whether they be priests, or people, is sent after them. A procedure, which could only have some excuse, if these critics could first prove, that the apostle's text ought to be thus read, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life."

Life , Law , Christ

“O Love! what hours were thine and mine,
In lands of palm and southern pine;
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine!”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

The Daisy, Stanza 1; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love

“Do not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have seen it.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

The Dominant Idea (1910)
Context: In everything that lives, if one looks searchingly, is limned the shadow line of an idea — an idea, dead or living, sometimes stronger when dead, with rigid, unswerving lines that mark the living embodiment with the stern immobile cast of the non-living. Daily we move among these unyielding shadows, less pierceable, more enduring than granite, with the blackness of ages in them, dominating living, changing bodies, with dead, unchanging souls. And we meet, also, living souls dominating dying bodies — living ideas regnant over decay and death. Do not imagine that I speak of human life alone. The stamp of persistent or of shifting Will is visible in the grass-blade rooted in its clod of earth, as in the gossamer web of being that floats and swims far over our heads in the free world of air.
Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have seen it.

Life , World , Imagination , Idea

“O evanescent temples built of man
To deities he honoured and dethroned!
Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Pan-Worship
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)
Context: O evanescent temples built of man
To deities he honoured and dethroned!
Earth shoots a trail of her eternal vine
To crown the head that men have ceased to honour.
Beneath the coronal of leaf and lichen
The mocking smile upon the lips derides
Pan's lost dominion; but the pointed ears
Are keen and prick'd with old remember'd sounds.
All my breast aches with longing for the past!
Thou God of stone, I have a craving in me
For knowledge of thee as thou wert in old
Enchanted twilights in Arcadia.

Men

“Satan, piercing space with his keen glance, contemplated the little globe of earth and water where of old he had planted the vine and formed the first tragic chorus.”

Anatole France book The Revolt of the Angels

Source: The Revolt of the Angels (1914), Ch. XXXV
Context: Satan, piercing space with his keen glance, contemplated the little globe of earth and water where of old he had planted the vine and formed the first tragic chorus. And he fixed his gaze on that Rome where the fallen God had founded his empire on fraud and lie. Nevertheless, at that moment a saint ruled over the Church. Satan saw him praying and weeping. And he said to him:
"To thee I entrust my Spouse. Watch over her faithfully. In thee I confirm the right and power to decide matters of doctrine, to regulate the use of the sacraments, to make laws and to uphold purity of morals. And the faithful shall be under obligation to conform thereto. My Church is eternal, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Thou art infallible. Nothing is changed."
And the successor of the apostles felt flooded with rapture. He prostrated himself, and with his forehead touching the floor, replied:
"O Lord, my God, I recognise Thy voice! Thy breath has been wafted like balm to my heart. Blessed be Thy name. Thy will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Water