One flower makes no garland. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower. [ Watts ]
The bright consummate flower. [ Milton ]
Little moments make an hour.
Little thoughts a book,
Little seeds a tree or flower.
Water-drops a brook;
Little deeds of faith and love
Make a home for you above. [ Anonymous ]
I may not to the world impart
The secret of its power,
But treasured in my inmost heart
I keep my faded flower. [ Ellen C Howarth ]
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flower. [ William Cowper ]
'Tis noon - a calm, unbroken sleep
Is on the blue waves of the deep;
A soft haze, like a fairy dream,
Is floating over wood and stream;
And many a broad magnolia flower,
Within its shadowy woodland bower,
Is gleaming like a lovely star. [ George D. Prentice ]
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes. [ Wordsworth ]
Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower. [ Burns ]
What is glory? what is fame?
The echo of a long-lost name;
A breath, an idle hour's brief talk;
The shadow of an arrant naught;
A flower that blossoms for a day.
Dying next morrow;
A stream that hurries on its way.
Singing of sorrow. [ Motherwell ]
Generosity is the flower of justice. [ Hawthorne ]
Death rides on every passing breeze,
He lurks in every flower. [ Bishop Heber ]
Wit is the flower of the imagination. [ Livy ]
The white flower of a blameless life. [ Tennyson ]
O! as a bee upon the flower, I hang
Upon the honey of thy eloquent tongue. [ Bulwer ]
Who have not saved some trifling thing
More prized than jewels rare,
A faded flower, a broken ring,
A tress of golden hair. [ Ellen C. Howarth ]
Oh! call my brother back to me!
I cannot play alone;
The summer comes with flower and bee -
Where is my brother gone? [ Mrs. Hemans ]
It is the finest flower in his garden. [ Proverb ]
Gather the rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying,
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying. [ Herrick ]
That dire disease, whose ruthless power
Withers the beauty - transient flower. [ Goldsmith ]
Good taste is the flower of good sense. [ A. Poincelot ]
The amen! of nature is always a flower. [ Holmes ]
As if the wind, not she, did walk,
Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk. [ Ben Jonson ]
Fame - a flower upon a dead man's heart. [ Motherwell ]
Catch, then, O catch the transient hour;
Improve each moment as it flies;
Life's a short summer - man a flower -
He dies - alas! how soon he dies! [ Dr. Johnson ]
Here eglantine embalm'd the air,
Hawthorne and hazel mingled there;
The primrose pale, and violet flower.
Found in each cliff a narrow bower;
Fox-glove and nightshade, side by side.
Emblems of punishment and pride,
Group'd their dark hues with every stain
The weather-beaten crags retain. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
Happiness is the natural flower of duty. [ Phillips Brooks ]
It is liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it. [ Cowper ]
Cheerfulness is the very flower of health. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. [ William Shakespeare ]
A globe of dew
Filling, in the morning new.
Some eyed flower, whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world;
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless are furled
In that frail and fading sphere.
With ten millions gathered there
To tremble, gleam and disappear. [ Shelley ]
The flower she touched on dipped and rose. [ Tennyson ]
This moment is a flower too fair and brief. [ Moore ]
Oh! roses and lilies are fair to see;
But the wild bluebell is the flower for me. [ Louisa A. Meredith ]
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. [ Gray ]
A delicate thought is a flower of the mind. [ Rollin ]
A foot more light, a step more true,
Ne'er from the heath-flower dashed the dew. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
The only amaranthine flower on earth
Is virtue; the only lasting treasure, truth. [ William Cowper ]
Or stars of morning, dew-drops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower. [ Milton ]
He bore a simple wild-flower wreath:
Narcissus, and the sweet brier rose;
Vervain, and flexile thyme, that breathe
Rich fragrance; modest heath, that glows
With purple bells; the amaranth bright.
That no decay, nor fading knows.
Like true love's holiest, rarest light;
And every purest flower, that blows,
In that sweet time, which Love most blesses,
When spring on summer's confines presses. [ Thomas Love Peacock ]
Do not idolatrize; beauty's a flower,
Which springs and withers almost in an hour. [ Wm. Smith ]
Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim.
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength - a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one! [ William Shakespeare ]
There's not a wind but whispers of thy name,
And not a flower that grows beneath the moon,
But in its hues and fragrance tells a tale
Of thee, my love. [ Barry Cornwall ]
The tender flower that lifts its head, elate,
Helpless must fall before the blasts of fate,
Sunk on the earth, defaced its lovely form,
Unless your shelter ward th' impending storm. [ Burns ]
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. [ Wordsworth ]
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly. [ Wordsworth ]
They know the time to go!
The fairy clocks strike their inaudible hour
In field and woodland, and each punctual flower
Bows at the signal an obedient head
And hastes to bed. [ Susan Coolidge ]
Sweet, good night!
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet. [ William Shakespeare ]
A flower that dies when first it begins to bud. [ William Shakespeare ]
As timid violets lade the ambient air
With their heart's richest fragrance, unaware
The fragrance whispers that the flower is there. [ Anna Katharine Green ]
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet.
The basest weed outbraves its dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. [ William Shakespeare ]
Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise
Their Master's flower, but leave it having done,
As fair as ever and as fit to use;
So both the flower doth stay and honey run. [ Herbert ]
Vain-glorious man, when fluttering wind does blow
In his light wings, is lifted up to sky;
The scorn of knighthood and true chivalry,
To think, without desert of gentle deed
And noble worth, to be advanced high,
Such praise is shame, but honour, virtue's meed.
Doth bear the fairest flower in honourable seed. [ Spenser ]
Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves. [ George Sand ]
Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine.
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine
For me kind nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower. [ Pope ]
Beauty is but a flower which wrinkles will devour. [ Thomas Nash ]
Beauty without virtue is a flower without perfume. [ French Proverb ]
First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea. [ Moore ]
A love-tint flushes the wind-flower's cheek,
Rich melodies gush from the violet's beak.
On the rifts of the rock, the wild columbines grow.
Their heavy honey-cups bending low. [ Sarah Helen Whitman ]
The vigour of manhood passes away like a spring flower.
Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious and free,
First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea. [ Moore ]
Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety. [ William Shakespeare ]
Beauty is an exquisite flower, and its perfume is virtue. [ Ruffini ]
Woman is a flower that exhales her perfume only in the shade. [ Lamennais ]
Beauty without modesty is like a flower broken from its stem.
Death is the dropping of the flower that the fruit may swell. [ Beecher ]
Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress. [ Charles Sumner ]
As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works. [ Whately ]
Fame! it is the flower of a day, that dies when the next sun rises. [ Ouida ]
But, oh! fell Death's untimely frost, That nipt my flower sae early. [ Burns ]
Pleasure is the flower that passes; remembrance, the lasting perfume. [ Boufflers ]
Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life. [ Chapin ]
The rose that lives its little hour is prized beyond the sculptured flower. [ Bryant ]
A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and a man cannot live without love. [ George P. Upton ]
Cherish flowers; a flower plucked from its parent stock soon loses its beauty. [ Catullus ]
Respect your wife. Heap earth around that flower, but never drop any in the chalice. [ A. de Musset ]
Earthly pride is like a passing flower, that springs to fall and blossoms but to die. [ Kirke White ]
A sweet new blossom of humanity, fresh fallen from God's own home to flower on earth. [ Gerald Massey ]
Pearly pride is like the passing flower, that springs to fall, and blossoms but to die. [ H. K. White ]
Beauty, frail flower that every season fears, blooms in thy colors for a thousand years. [ Pope ]
To me the meanest flower that blows, can give thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. [ Wordsworth ]
The perfect flower of religion opens in the soul only when all self-seeking is abandoned. [ John Burroughs ]
Where confidence is wanting, the most beautiful flower in the garland of love is missing. [ Goethe ]
Out of the same garden-mould grows the weed as the flower, and the weed flaunts itself abroad. [ Bodenstedt ]
The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended. [ Mrs. Oliphant ]
Innocence is a flower which withers when touched, but blooms not again, though watered with tears. [ Hooper ]
Divine love is a sacred flower, which in its early bud is happiness, and in its full bloom is heaven. [ Hervey ]
Mental sunshine makes the mind grow, and perpetual happiness makes human nature a flower garden in bloom. [ Christian D. Larson ]
If thou wouldst attain to thy highest, go look upon a flower; what that does willessly, that do thou willingly. [ Schiller ]
Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him. [ Phillips Brooks ]
The fragrance of the flower is never borne against the breeze; but the fragrance of human virtues diffuses itself everywhere. [ Ramayana ]
Like a beautiful flower full of color, but without scent, are the fine but fruitless words of him who does not act accordingly. [ Buddha ]
There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop. [ Hare ]
We can take up no scheme, however wild and impracticable, but it will strike off some flower or fruit from the tree of knowledge. [ Ward Beecher ]
Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revery is the same flower, when rank and running to seed. [ Tupper ]
'Twas but a dream - let it pass - let it vanish like so many others! What I thought was a flower is only a weed, and is worthless. [ Longfellow ]
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Art needs solitude or misery or passion. Lukewarm zephyrs wilt it. It is a rock-flower flourishing by stormy blasts and in stony soil. [ Alex. Dumas ]
When pleasure, like the midnight flower that scorns the eye of vulgar light, begins to bloom for sons of night and maids who love the moon. [ Moore ]
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. [ R. South ]
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. [ Cowper ]
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. [ Percival ]
Die when I may, I want it said of me, by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower when I thought a flower would grow. [ Lincoln ]
Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil. [ Amiel ]
If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we could cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels must give. [ George Macdonald ]
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. [ Richter ]
I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it. [ Colton ]
The presence of a young girl is like the presence of a flower; the one gives its perfume to all that approach it, the other her grace to all that surround her. [ Louis Desnoyers ]
The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower. [ Froude ]
The amount of honey which we accumulate from the years as they pass, depends not so much upon the number of flower-gardens through which we rove, as upon our powers of extraction. [ Henry Wood ]
Never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always; like God, to love always - this is duty. [ Amiel ]
We should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower; she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it; and those sweets she herself improves and concocts into honey. [ C. C. Cotton ]
To guide scoundrels by love is a method that will not hold together; hardly for the flower of men will love do; and for the sediment and scoundrelism of them it has not even a chance to do. [ Carlyle ]
Grief is a flower as delicate and prompt to fade as happiness. Still, it does not wholly die. Like the magic rose, dried and unrecognizable, a warm air breathed on it will suffice to renew its bloom. [ Mme. de Gasparin ]
Heaven is the day of which grace is the dawn; the rich, ripe fruit of which grace is the lovely flower; the inner shrine of that most glorious temple to which grace forms the approach and outer court. [ Rev. Dr. Guthrie ]
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? [ Mrs. Balfour ]
Poetry, like truth, is a common flower. God has sown it over the earth like daisies, sprinkled with tears, or glowing in the sun, even as he places the crocus and the March frosts together, and beautifully mingles life and death. [ Ebenezer Elliott ]
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up. That which was a weed in one intelligence becomes a flower in the other, and a flower again dwindles down to a mere weed by the same change. [ O. W. Holmes ]
Human excellence, parted from God, is like a fable flower, which, according to Rabbis, Eve plucked when passing out of paradise - severed from its native root, it is only the touching memorial of a lost Eden; sad, while charming - beautiful, but dead. [ C. Stanford ]
Who can describe the transports of a heart truly parental on beholding a daughter shoot up like some fair and modest flower, and acquire, day after day, fresh beauty and growing sweetness, so as to fill every eye with pleasure and every heart with admiration? [ Fordyce ]
There is dew in one flower and not in another, because one opens its cup and takes it in, while the other closes itself and the drop runs off. So God rains goodness and mercy as wide as the dew, and if we lack them, it is because we do not open our hearts to receive them. [ Aughey ]
It would not be more unreasonable to transplant a favorite flower out of black earth into gold dust than it is for a person to let money-getting harden his heart into contempt, or into impatience, of the little attentions, the merriments and the caresses of domestic life. [ Mountford ]
Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage flower gives honey to the bee, a king's garden none to the butterfly. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the best flower of civilisation, and the best result which life has to offer us--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know is brought into play, and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
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! [ Richter ]
Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree. [ Barrow ]
Who is there who has not experienced that 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? [ Richter ]
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. [ Chapin ]
The little flower which sprung up through the hard payment of poor Picciola's prison, was beautiful from contrast with the dreary sterility which surrounded it. So here, amid the rough walls, are there fresh tokens of nature; and oh, 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. [ E. H. Chapin ]
Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare. [ Willmott ]
As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirlwind hath blown the dust of the churchyard into the church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the church into the churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the patrician, this is the noble flower, and this the yeoman, this the plebeian bran?
[ Rev. Dr. Donne ]