In the condition of men, it frequently happens that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity; and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature, the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
Weeds grow sometimes very much like flowers, and you can't tell the difference between true and false merely by the shape.
Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers?
For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
You say you're looking for someone who'll pick you up each time you fall, to gather flowers constantly and to come each time you call, a lover your life and nothing more. But it ain't me, babe.
The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair: The roses fearfully on thorns did stand, One blushing shame, another white despair; A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath; But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth A vengeful canker eat him up to death. More flowers I noted, yet I none could see But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee.
Look on the bee upon the wing 'mong flowers; How brave, how bright his life! then mark, him hiv'd, Cramp'd, cringing in his self-built, social cell, Thus it is in the world-hive; most where men Lie deep in cities as in drifts.
Nothing fruitful ever comes when plants are forced to flower in the wrong season.
It is not the bee's touching on the flowers that gathers the honey, but her abiding for a time upon them, and drawing out the sweet.
Look at your heart-flower and smile. You will be able to solve your most pressing problems.
Flowers are my music.
There are no flowers in the Moon; that's why the Moon is a boring place!
The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.
It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.
I was raised by the song Of the murmuring grove And loving I learned Among Flowers.
I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder.
You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the truth. So many days in the archives, copying, copying. The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung make heavy baggage. Here! I've picked you a bunch of wild flowers. Their meaning is the same but they're much easier to carry.
Now stand you on the top of happy hours, And many maiden gardens yet unset, With virtuous wish would bear you living flowers, Much liker than your painted counterfeit: So should the lines of life that life repair Which this, Time's pencil, or my pupil pen Neither in inward worth nor outward fair Can make you live your self in eyes of men.
The physician. . . is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization.
The colours of insects and many smaller animals contribute to conceal them from the larger ones which prey upon them. Caterpillars which feed on leaves are generally green; and earth-worms the colour of the earth which they inhabit; butter-flies, which frequent flowers, are coloured like them; small birds which frequent hedges have greenish backs like the leaves, and light-coloured bellies like the sky, and are hence less visible to the hawk who passes under them or over them.