You sit upon thorns. [ Proverb ]

Roses grow among thorns. [ Proverb ]

Roses fair on thorns do grow:
And they tell me even so
Sorrows into virtues grow. [ Dr. W. Smith ]

Under the flowers are thorns. [ Proverb ]

Thorns whiten, yet do nothing. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Roses fall, but the thorns remain. [ Dutch Proverb ]

Barefoot must not go among thorns. [ Proverb ]

There are no roses without thorns. [ Proverb ]

Thorns make the greatest crackling. [ Proverb ]

A myrtle among thorns is a myrtle still. [ Proverb ]

Many have sought roses and found thorns.

A crown
Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns. [ Milton ]

He that handles thorns shall smart for it. [ Proverb ]

He that goes barefoot must not plant thorns. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun. [ Shakespeare ]

He that scatters thorns must not go barefoot. [ Proverb ]

They love dancing well, that dance barefoot upon thorns. [ Proverb ]

Hedgehogs lodge among thorns, because themselves are prickly. [ Proverb ]

Every noble crown is, and on earth will ever be, a crown of thorns. [ Carlyle ]

If you lie upon roses when young, you will lie upon thorns when old. [ Proverb ]

O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness! [ Victor Hugo ]

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown. [ William Penn ]

Sweet tastes have sour closes; and he repents on thorns that sleeps in beds of roses. [ Quarles ]

Leave her to heaven and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, to prick and sting her. [ William Shakespeare ]

Love is like the rose: so sweet, that one always tries to gather it in spite of the thorns.

The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touched by the thorns. [ Moore ]

The heart of a coquette is like a rose, of which the lovers pluck the leaves, leaving only the thorns for the husband.

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted, - they have torn me, and I bleed: I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed. [ Byron ]

Life is thickly sown with thorns. I know no other remedy than to pass rapidly over them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes the greater is their power to harm us. [ Voltaire ]

He that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down on his little handful of thorns. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

But the grave is not deep; it is the shining tread of an angel that seeks us. When the unknown hand throws the fatal dart at the end of man, then boweth he his head and the dart only lifts the crown of thorns from his wounds. [ Richter ]

He who boasts of being perfect is perfect in folly. I never saw a perfect man. Every rose has its thorns, and every day its night. Even the sun shows spots, and the skies are darkened with clouds; and faults of some kind nestle in every bosom. [ Spurgeon ]

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers, and the sharpest thorns; as the heavens are sometimes overcast — alternately tempestuous and serene — so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasures and with pains. [ Burton ]

Oh! woe to him who first had the cruelty to ridicule the name of old maid, a name which recalls so many sorrowful deceptions, so many sufferings, so much destitution! Woe to him who finds a target for his sarcasm in an involuntary misfortune, and who crowns white hair with thorns! [ E. Souvestre ]

There is the same difference between diligence and neglect, that there is between a garden curiously kept and the sluggard's field when it was all overgrown with nettles and thorns; the one is clothed with beauty and the gracious amiableness of content and cheering loveliness; while the other hath nothing but either little smarting pungencies or else such transpiercings as rankle the flesh within. [ Feltham ]

Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear dulness to maturity, and to glory in the vigor and luxuriance of her chance productions. She scatters the seeds of genius to the winds, and though some may perish among the stony places of the world, and some may be choked by the thorns and brambles of early adversity, yet others will now and then strike root even in the clefts of the rock, struggle bravely up into sunshine, and spread over their sterile birthplace all the beauties of vegetation. [ Washington Irving ]