"The truly great ones rely on substance, and not on surface, hold on to the fruit, and not to the flower."
Flower quotes
Flower
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Flower quotes (page 52 of 179)
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"The rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything that passes through this night can still grow fairer or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward. Did you not know?"
"Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!"
"Bee, why are you staring at me? I am not a flower??"
"In other countries, congenital introverts simply remain introverts all their lives, neither advancing nor retreating, but America's commitment to extroversion as a national art form can abrade some naturally aloof personalities until they flower into deadly nightshade."
"I look at everything. God gave me eyes and I look at women and men and subway excavations and moving pictures and the little flowers of the field. I casually inspect the universe."
"Just as one can make a lot of garlands from a heap of flowers, so man, subject to birth and death as he is, should make himself a lot of good karma."
"Just as the bee takes the nectar and leaves without damaging the color or scent of the flowers, so should the sage act in a village."
"Death carries off a man busy picking flowers with an besotted mind, like a great flood does a sleeping village."
"With understanding, those we love will certainly flower."
"I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."
"Flowers are one of the few things we buy, bring home, watch die, and we don't ask for our money back."
"That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: 'Go away, you bunch of boring people."
"Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked."
"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."
"And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors."
"At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher."
"We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things - metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities."
"A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out."
"Yoko [Ono] was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Long fellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say 'Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table' which gives you the whole picture."