Flower quotes
3.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside flower — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile."
"If you wish to produce a perfect rose, you must cut off the other buds which are spoiling the growth of the perfect flower."
"Why should we not recognize in the lightning, the thunder, and the storm wind, the approach of an overwhelming Power, and in the scent of flowers and the gently rustling zephyr the presence of a Being full of love?"
"Break not the rose; its fragrance and beauty are surely sufficient, resting contented with these, never a thorn shall you feel."
"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer -- and what trees and seasons smelled like -- how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."
"...full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity."
"Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive."
"When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it’s going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body as a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. [from the poem "When Death Comes"]"
"To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends."
"Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art."
"[This world] exists nonnecessarily, improbably, and causelessly. It exists for absolutely no reason at all. It is inexplicably and stunningly actual . . . The impact of this captivated realisation upon me is overwhelming. I am completely stunned. I take a few dazed steps in the dark meadow, and fall among the flowers. I lie stupefied, whirling without comprehension in this world through numberless worlds other than this one."
"Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand."
"(and from my thighs which shrug and pant a murdering rain leapingly reaches the upward singular deepest flower which she carries in a gesture of her hips)"
"Always it’s Spring)and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves."
"For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time."
"How sure I feel, how warm and strong and happy For the future! How sure the future is within me; I am like a seed with a perfect flower enclosed."
"We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen."
"A flower is not better when it blooms than when it is merely a bud; at each stage it is the same thing — a flower in the process of expressing its potential."
"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower; Radiance and odour are not its dower; It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full, It desires what it has not, the beautiful."
"Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."
