Gardens

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. ~~ Doug Larson

To this day I cannot see a bright daffodil, a proud gladiola, or a smooth eggplant without thinking of Papa. Like his plants and trees, I grew up as a part of his garden. ~~ Leo Buscaglia

The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them. ~~ Stella Benson

A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine, and the hearth in foul weather. ~~ Judith Merkle Riley

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires. ~~ Marceline Cox

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his--attached to his own like a small garden plot to a deer park. ~~ Henry James

[On working cats:] On some grave business, soft and slow
Along the garden paths you go
With bold and burning eyes,
Or stand with twitching tail to mark
What starts and rustles in the dark
Among the peonies. ~~ A. C. Bensen

Creative thought seems prone to flower in symbols before it ripens to fruit. ~~ Maude Meagher

A path with heart will include our unique gifts and creativity. The outer expression of our heart may be to write books, to build buildings, to create ways for people to serve one another. It may be to teach or to garden, to serve food or play music. Whatever we choose, the creations of our life must be grounded in our hearts. Our love is the source of all energy to create and connect. If we act without a connection to the heart, even the greatest things in our life can become dried up, meaningless, or barren. ~~ Jack Kornfield

Some people like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path. ~~ Jean Anouilh

She [the cat] would walk up and down between the beds [of daffodils], the black plume of her tail mingling with the green spikes of the daffodil leaves; and sometimes when I was bending down to pick a stem, she would come to me, pushing her head against my hand, and then I would cease to pick, and proceed to pay her the attention she expected of me. Or I would put a basket down at the edge of a meadow, go on with my picking, then look back and find her sitting in the basket. ~~ Derek Tangye

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make a better soup. ~~ H. L. Mencken

If you gave Ruth a rose, she'd peel all the petals off to make sure there weren't any greenfly. And when she'd done that, she'd turn round and say, do you call that a rose? Look at it, it's all in bits. ~~ Alan Ayckbourn

Gardening is an exercise in optimism. Sometimes, it is the triumph of hope over experience. ~~ Marina Schinz [Visions of Paradise]

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. ~~ G. K. Chesterton

If we scorn bad taste, we shall have neither painting nor dancing, neither palaces nor gardens. ~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The tints of autumn--a mighty flower garden blossoming under the spell of the enchanter, Frost. ~~ John Greenleaf Whittier

I'd help the homeless. And I would be sure that everyone has a rose. ~~ Sixth-grader's essay

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher [Life Thoughts]

I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice. ~~ Hannah Green

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. ~~ Gray [Elegy in a Country Courtyard]

All for each. The winds wander, the snow and rain and dew fall, the earth whirls--all but to prosper a poor lush violet. ~~ John Muir

[On the death of her mother (Judy Garland):] It wasn't suicide. It wasn't sleeping pills, it wasn't cirrhosis. I think she was just tired, like a flower that blooms and gives joy and beauty to the world and then wilts away. ~~ Liza Minnelli

'Tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes. ~~ William Wordsworth

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts. ~~ Sigmund Freud

A flower falls even though we love it. A weed grows even though we don't love it. ~~ Dogen

…Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. ~~ William Wordsworth

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. ~~ Albert Schweitzer

In a bright day, during any of the summer months, your walk is through an atmosphere of butterflies, so gaudy in hue, and so varied in form, that I often thought they looked like flowers on the wing. ~~ Frances Trollope

Death lies on her, like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. ~~ Shakespeare [Romeo and Juliet]

Many a fair flower springs out of a dunghill. ~~ New England Saying

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory; odors when sweet violets sicken, live within the sense they quicken. ~~ Percy Shelley

One can get just as much exaltation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

At rare moments in history, by a series of accidents never to be repeated, arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount, hedonistic, mindless, intent upon the glorious physical instant. ~~ Colm MacInnes

There are as many jealousies in life as there are different flowers or trees or animals. ~~ Martha Albrand

Youth's for an hour
Beauty's a flower
But love is the jewel that wins the world. ~~ Moira O'Neill

Grief and pain are but the soil from which springs the lovely plant--unselfishness. Be gentle and learn how to suffer … Whatever you can do to live bravely -- without impatience or repining -- will help you to live someday in a joyful contentment. ~~ Helen Keller

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be. ~~ Hubert H. Humphrey

April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers. ~~ Edna St Vincent Millay

A sponge to wipe out the past; a rose to make the present sweet; and a kiss to salute the future. ~~ Arabic proverb

The dust comes secretly day after day,
Lies on my ledge and dulls my shining things.
But O this dust that I shall drive away
Is flowers and kings,
Is Solomon's temple, poets, Nineveh. ~~ Viola Meynell

Don't send me flowers when I die--give them to me now so we can appreciate their beauty together! ~~ C. Leslie Charles

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal--that is your success. ~~ Henry David Thoreau

The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show. ~~ Jacob Bronowski

If you want to say it with flowers, a single rose says: "I'm cheap." ~~ Delta Burke

The earth and the ocean seem
To sleep in one another's arms, and dream
Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we
Read in their smiles, and call reality. ~~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone,
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone. ~~ Sara Teasdale

Magical country, full of memories and dreams,
My youth lies in the crevices of your hills;
Here in the silk of your grass by the edge of the meadows,
Every flower and leaf has its memories of you. ~~ Katherine Tynan Hinkson

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud. Any of us put out more and better ideas if our efforts are truly appreciated. ~~ Alexander Osborn

Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. ~~ Mark Twain

Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow. ~~ Alice Mackenzie Swaim

God is the friend of silence. See how nature--trees, flowers, grass--grows in silence; see the stars, the moon, and the sun, how they move in silence. ~~ Mother Theresa

My mother is everywhere…
In the perfume of a rose,
The eyes of a tiger,
The pages of a book,
The food that we partake,
The whistling wind of the desert,
The blazing gems of sunset,
The crystal light of full moon,
The opal veils of sunshine. ~~ Grace Seton-Thompson

One of the healthiest ways to gamble is with a spade and a package of garden seeds. ~~ Dan Bennett

A human being isn't an orchid, he must draw something from the soil he grows in. ~~ Sara Jeannette Duncan

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket. ~~ Unattributed

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength--in search of my mother's garden, I found my own. ~~ Alice Walker

You know how some people like to think that their love for classical music makes them spiritual or at least something quite special? And others who think you are a monster if you don't "love children," however obnoxious the children may be? Well, I've found out that many people who love flowers look down on those who don't. ~~ Ruth Stout

For the homeless all ways wither
Like cut flowers. ~~ Nelly Sachs

A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds. ~~ Unattributed

[On Holland:] There is not a richer or more carefully tilled garden spot in the whole world than this leaky, springy little country. ~~ Mary Mapes Dodge

My garden is an honest place. Every tree and every vine are incapable of concealment, and tell after two or three months exactly what sort of treatment they have had. The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake but come and show his line. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot endow even the best machine with initiative; the jolliest steamroller will not plant flowers. ~~ Walter Lippmann

You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry. Don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. ~~ Walter C. Hagen

To be a good cook you have to have a love of the good, a love of hand work, and a love of creating. Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening, or build a boat in the basement. Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen, because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity as drawing, or wood carving, or music. And cooking draws upon your every talent--and the more experience you have the less likely are your experiments to end in drivel and disaster. The more you know, the more you can create. There's no end to imagination in the kitchen. ~~ Julia Child

Child, you are like a flower,
So sweet and pure and fair.
I look at you, and sadness
Touches me with a prayer. ~~ Heinrich Heine

A pilot's business is with the wind, with the stars, with sand, with the sea. He strives to outwit the forces of nature. He stares with expectancy for the coming of dawn the way a gardener awaits the coming of spring. He looks forward to port as to a promised land, and truth for him is what lives in the stars. ~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery (see Said Who?)

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that -- just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [Locked Rooms and Open Doors]

Yellow butterflies
look like flowers flying through
the warm summer air. ~~ Andrea Willis

Flowers and fruit are never combined in one place: it is impossible that teeth and delicacies should exist simultaneously. ~~ Sa'ib of Tabriz

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its net of gold. ~~ Louis MacNeice

Books, doctrines, ideas have been compared to the flowers in a garden. 'Tis not always the best argument that prevails, and the gardener wins the prize who chooses his season right. ~~ John Morley

Who first beholds the light of day
In Spring's sweet flowery month of May
And wears an Emerald all her life,
Shall be a loved and happy wife. ~~ Traditional birthstone rhyme

His words and actions flowed from him as smoothly, as inevitably and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately. ~~ Leo Tolstoy

God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December. ~~ J. M. Barrie

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze...
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. ~~ William Wordsworth

When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. ~~ Chinese proverb

Came the Spring with all its splendor,
All its birds and all its blossoms,
All its flowers and leaves and grasses. ~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [The Song of Hiawatha]

And what is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~~ Anais Nin

Dandelions and blue flowers are still growing in sunny places. Saw in a barn a prodigious treasure of onions in their silvery coats, exhaling a penetrating perfume. ~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Flowers are words
Which even a babe may understand. ~~ Bishop Coxe [The Singing of Birds]

Never strike your wife, even with a flower. ~~ Hindu proverb

My father is dead and I cannot turn him into a white rose, though I try. ~~ Deborah Keenan

[Replying to her daughter, who asked her mother if she remembered anything curious about the smell of the upstairs of the White House:] That one floor had the smell of an old house by the sea, a musty scent, overlaid with roses. ~~ Frances Cleveland

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them, and they are full of toads. ~~ Logan Pearsall Smith

The flowers of life are but illusions. How many fade away and leave no trace; how few yield any fruit; and the fruit itself, how rarely does it ripen! ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn't much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place where it was always dark. ~~ Stephen King [The Stand]

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it--a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand--as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art. ~~ Marc Chagall

Adversity is like the period of the rain … cold, comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season have their birth the flower, the fruit, the date, the rose, and the pomegranate. ~~ Sir Walter Scott

It's spreading like wildflowers. ~~ Samuel Goldwyn

Flowers are my music. ~~ Dr. Thomas Arnold

Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

For I do love you… as the dew loves the flowers; as the birds love the sunshine; as the wavelets love the breeze. ~~ Mark Twain

He loved the hills in the spring when the snows go off and the first flowers come. He loved the warm sun of summer and the high mountain meadows, the trails through the timber and the sudden clear blue of the lakes. Best of all he loved the fall, with the tawny, and gray, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods and above the hills the high blue windless skies. ~~ Ernest Hemingway [Graveside eulogy for a friend]

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings. ~~ Gustave Flaubert

A cat isn't fussy--just so long as you remember he likes his milk in the shallow, rose-patterned saucer and his fish on the blue plate. From which he will take it, and eat it off the floor. ~~ Arthur Bridges

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. ~~ Mark Twain

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals. Some seem to smile, some have a sad expression, some are pensive and diffident, others again are plain, honest, and upright. ~~ Henry Ward Beecher

The fragrance always remains in the hand that gives the rose. ~~ Heda Bejar

Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness … until it flowers again from within. ~~ Galway Kinnell