C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Flowers
The bright consummate flower.
Flowers are love’s truest language.
Prophets of fragrance, beauty, joy, and song.
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower.
Flowers preach to us if we will hear.
How like they are to human things!
Ye pretty daughters of the earth and sun.
The amen! of nature is always a flower.
They speak of hope to the fainting heart.
Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.
Flowers are like the pleasures of the world.
That queen of secrecy, the violet.
These stars of earth, these golden flowers.
There spring the wild-flowers—fair as can be.
The flowers are gone when the fruits appear to ripen.
Flora peering in April’s front.
A snow of blossoms, and a wild of flowers.
Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet forget-me-not.
Beautiful objects of the wild-bee’s love.
Sweet flowers are slow, and weeds make haste.
The moss-clad violet, fragrant and concealed like hidden charity.
The plants look up to heaven, from whence they have their nourishment.
Flowers are sent to do God’s work in unrevealed paths, and to diffuse influence by channels that we hardly suspect.
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance;***and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Look how the blue-eyed violets glance love to one another!
Ye living flowers, that skirt the eternal frost!
The milk-white lilies that lean from the fragrant hedge.
Fade, flowers, fade! Nature will have it so; ’tis but what we in our autumn do.
With fragrant breath the lilies woo me now, and softly speaks the sweet-voiced mignonette.
The sweet forget-me-nots that grow for happy lovers.
The daisies’ eyes are a-twinkle with happy tears of dew.
Sweet flowers alone can say what passion fears revealing.
Flowers, leaves, fruit, are the air-woven children of light.
Foster the beautiful, and every hour thou callest new flowers to birth.
The buttercups across the field made sunshine rifts of splendor.
And the spring arose on the garden fair like the spirit of Love felt everywhere.
Like saintly vestals, pale in prayer, their pure breath sanctifies the air.
Flowers may beckon towards us, but they speak toward heaven and God.
The opening and the folding flowers, that laugh to the summer’s day.
He who does not love flowers has lost all love and fear of God.
Flowers spring up unsown and dip ungathered.
Floral apostles! that in dewy splendor weep without woe, and blush without a crime.
I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.
Emblems of our own great resurrection, emblems of the bright and better land.
In eastern lands they talk in flowers, and they tell in a garland their loves and cares.
Lovely flowers are smiles of God’s goodness.
I do love violets; they tell the history of woman’s love.
Happy are they who can create a rose tree or erect a honeysuckle.
How the universal heart of man blesses flowers! They are wreathed round the cradle, the marriage altar, and the tomb.
The breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand.
It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet.
Who that has loved knows not the tender tale which flowers reveal, when lips are coy to tell?
E’en the rough rocks with tender myrtle bloom, and trodden weeds send out a rich perfume.
Flowers are the beautiful hieroglyphics of nature, with which she indicates how much she loves us.
If thou wouldest attain to thy highest, go look upon a flower; what that does willessly, that do thou willingly.
The daffodil is our door-side queen; she pushes up the sward already, to spot with sunshine the early green.
I regard them, as Charles the Emperor did Florence, that they are too pleasant to be looked upon except on holidays.
Most gladly would I give the blood-stained laurel for the first violet which March brings us, the fragrant pledge of the new-fledged year.
There is not the least flower but seems to hold up its head and to look pleasantly, in the secret sense of the goodness of its Heavenly Maker.
A passion for flowers is, I really think, the only one which long sickness leaves untouched with its chilling influence.
The Omnipotent has sown His name on the heavens in glittering stars; but upon earth He planteth His name by tender flowers.
Leaves are the Greek, flowers the Italian, phase of the spirit of beauty that reveals itself through the flora of the globe.
I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
Sweet flower, thou tellest how hearts as pure and tender as thy leaf, as low and humble as thy stem, will surely know the joy that peace imparts.
Your voiceless lips, flowers, are living preachers—each cup a pulpit, and each leaf a book.
The herb feeds upon the juice of a good soil, and drinks in the dew of heaven as eagerly, and thrives by it as effectually, as the stalled ox that tastes everything that he eats or drinks.
Flowers never emit so sweet and strong a fragrance as before a storm. Beauteous soul! when a storm approaches thee, be as fragrant as a sweet-smelling flower.
Not a flower but shows some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, of His unrivaled pencil. He inspires their balmy odors, and imparts their hues,
What a pity flowers can utter no sound! A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle—oh, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents—flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.
Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions—just as we see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling sun of summer.
To analyze the charms of flowers is like dissecting music; it is one of those things which it is far better to enjoy than to attempt to understand.
What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome. Are not flowers the stars of the earth, and are not our stars the flowers of heaven?
Learn, O student, the true wisdom. See yon bush aflame with roses, like the burning bush of Moses. Listen, and thou shalt hear, if thy soul be not deaf, how from out it, soft and clear, speaks to thee the Lord Almighty.
Flowers are the bright remembrances of youth; they waft us back, with their bland odorous breath, the joyous hours that only young life knows, ere we have learnt that this fair earth hides graves.
There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers that now and then, from the influence of mood or circumstance, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love.
As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden without them, both for their own sake and for the sake of old-fashioned folks, who used to love them.
Doubtless botany has its value; but the flowers knew how to preach divinity before men knew how to dissect and botanize them; they are apt to stop preaching, though, so soon as we begin to dissect and botanize them.
The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.
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, like the broad-faced sunflower and hollyhock.
Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age—the only perfectly beautiful things on earth—joyous, innocent, half divine—useless, say they who are wiser than God.
To cultivate a garden is to walk with God, to go hand in hand with nature in some of her most beautiful processes, to learn something of her choicest secrets, and to have a more intelligent interest awakened in the beautiful order of her works elsewhere.
There is to me a daintiness about early flowers that touches me like poetry. They blow out with such a simple loveliness among the common herbs of pastures, and breathe their lives so unobtrusively, like hearts whose beatings are too gentle for the world.
Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand.
Flowers should deck the brow of the youthful bride, for they are in themselves a lovely type of marriage. They should twine round the tomb, for their perpetually renewed beauty is a symbol of the resurrection. They should festoon the altar, for their fragrance and their beauty ascend in perpetual worship before the Most High.
“If flowers have souls,” said Undine, “the bees, whose nurses they are, must seem to them darling children at the breast. I once fancied a paradise for the spirits of departed flowers.” “They go,” answered I, “not into paradise, but into a middle state; the souls of lilies enter into maidens’ foreheads, those of hyacinths and forget-me-nots dwell in their eyes, and those of roses in their lips.”
The little flower which sprung up through the hard pavement of poor Picciola’s prison was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here amid rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature. And O, the beautiful lessons which flowers teach to children, especially in the city! The child’s mind can grasp with ease the delicate suggestions of flowers.
Often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us, as village children, a grove of pleasure, has in after years of manhood, and in the town, given us by its old perfume, an indescribable transport back into godlike childhood; and how, like a flower goddess, it has raised us into the first embracing Aurora clouds of our first dim feelings!
He must have an artist’s eye for color and form who can arrange a hundred flowers as tastefully, in any other way, as by strolling through a garden, and picking here one and there one, and adding them to the bouquet in the accidental order in which they chance to come. Thus we see every summer day the fair lady coming in from the breezy side hill with gorgeous colors and most witching effects. If only she could be changed to alabaster, was ever a finer show of flowers in so fine a vase? But instead of allowing the flowers to remain as they were gathered, they are laid upon the table, divided, rearranged on some principle of taste, I know not what, but never again have that charming naturalness and grace which they first had.