Seventy-Five Quotes About Flowers

 The following lists seventy-five quotes that talk about flowers. All quotes have been placed in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Authors include e. e. cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, A. A. Milne, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Ella Wilcox, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth, and more.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Edward Abbey

With daffodils mad footnotes for the spring,
And asters purple asterisks for autumn -
Conrad Aiken

Pluck not the wayside flower;
It is the traveler’s dower.
William Allingham

Friends are flowers in life’s garden.

Anonymous

God loved the flowers and invented soil. Man loved the flowers and invented vases.

Anonymous variation of a saying by Jacques Deval, “God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.”

It is not enough for a gardener to love flowers; he must also hate weeds.

Anonymous

God gave us memories that we may have roses in December.

J. M. Barrie

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.

Basho

Hoeing: A manual method of severing roots from stems of newly planted flowers and vegetables.

Henry Beard

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 the hollyhock.

Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.

Henry Beecher

My garden slumbers in the winter, peaceful, quiet, weedfree.

It’s tranquil in this setting, no weeds to be seen.

But comes the spring with its warmth and flowers delight

then the weeds poke out their ugly head, what a nightmarish site.

I pull, I scream, they reappear. My husband says “Didn’t we just do this last year, dear?”

My endless battle, it seems, I’m doomed not to win.

Is shooting your weeds considered a sin?

Christine Blanksvard

You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Hal Borland

I have loved flowers that fade,

Within those magic tents

Rich hues have marriage made

With sweet unmemoried scents.
Robert Bridges

A flower is an educated weed.

Luther Burbank

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.

Lydia M. Child

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

How can one help shivering with delight when one’s hot fingers close around the stem of a live flower, cool from the shade and stiff with newborn vigor!

Colette

The earth laughs in flowers.

e.e. cummings

We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all.

Dorothy Day

There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 [Flowers] are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out values all the utilities of the world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think the true gardener is a lover of his flowers, not a critic of them. I think the true gardener is the reverent servant of Nature, not her truculent, wife-beating master. I think the true gardener, the older he grows, should more and more develop a humble, grateful, and uncertain spirit.

Reginald Farrer

There is no road of flowers leading to glory.
Jean de La Fontaine

One marked feature of the people, both high and low, is a love for flowers.
Robert Fortune

If you’ve never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.

Audra Foveo

Gardens can be sharp and spiky as well as rose—embowered and honeysuckle—twined: there are corners and settings where thistles are not such an asinine taste after all.

Robin Lane Fox

Oh, hardy flower, disdained as weed,

Despised for head of feathery seed,

Your unsung virtues rate a ballad,

Choice roots for wine, crisp leaves for salad.

Betty Gay, “Dandelion”

Flowers are beautiful hieroglyphics of nature, with which she indicates how much she loves us.

Wolfgang von Geothe

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Jean Giraudoux

I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.

Emma Goldman

May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.

Heinrich Heine

My basic weeding rule: if they grow in rows they’re flowers; if they don’t they’re weeds.

David Hobson

And so it criticized each flower,

This supercilious seed;

Until it woke one summer hour,

And found itself a weed.

Mildred Howells, “The Different Seed”

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.

The Koran

We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.

Abraham Lincoln

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

James Russell Lowell

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?

Maurice Maeterlinck

When I have the time to take a walk, I would often take the time to admire the grass. Grass doesn’t make a fuss. It doesn’t try to be beautiful or outstanding. It doesn’t want to attract attention. It is so humble that it even allows people to walk all over it. Yet, it possess such strength. It glows in healthy green despite being stepped all over, and when a typhoon strikes and all the flowers die and all the trees get uprooted, humble grass survives. And humble grass, in its own humble way, provides food for animals, shelter for insects, and joy to some funny guy walking past. I think a virtuous man should be like grass. Humble, unnoticed, yet possessing great strength and kindness.

Tan Chade Meng

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Afternoon on a Hill”

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them

A. A. Milne, as Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh

Being perfect artists and ingenuous poets, the Chinese have piously preserved the love and holy cult of flowers; one of the very rare and most ancient traditions which has survived their decadence. And since flowers had to be distinguished from each other, they have attributed graceful analogies to them, dreamy images, pure and passionate names which perpetuate and harmonize in our minds the sensations of gentle charm and violent intoxication with which they inspire us.

Octave Mirbeau

By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.

Henry Mitchell

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude Monet

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

John Muir

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Iris Murdoch

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Elizabeth Murray

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

Beverly Nichols

In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.

Kozuko Okakura

Flowers are without hope. Because hope is tomorrow and flowers have no tomorrow.

Antonio Porchia

A flower’s appeal is in its contradictions—so delicate in form yet strong in fragrance, so small in size yet big in beauty, so short in life yet long on effect.

Adabella Radici

Look at us, said the violets blooming at her feet, all last winter we slept in the seeming death but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you.

Edward Payson Rod

The indignity of it!-With everything blooming above me,

Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,

Whole fields lovely and inviolate

Me down in the fetor of weeds,

Crawling on all fours,

Alive, in a slippery grave.

Theodore Roethke, “Weed Puller”

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.

John Ruskin

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

Vita Sackville-West

Their names I know not,

But to every weed its flower,

And loveliness.

Sampu

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.

William Shakespeare

Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.

William Shakespeare

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...

Susan Polis Shutz

Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers, but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blossoms.

Ikkyu Sojun

The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorite; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.

Freya Stark

When you have done your best for a flower, and it fails, you have some reason to be aggrieved.

Frank Swinnerton

A flowering weed;

Hearing its name,

I looked anew at it.

Teiji

Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
Francis Thompson, “The Poppy”

In my garden, there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.

Abram L. Urban

Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they’re killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? “Sweetheart, let’s make up. Have this deceased squirrel.”

From The Washington Post

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.

Walt Whitman

A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

Walt Whitman

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.

Tennessee Williams

A profusion of pink roses bending ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

William Carlos Williams

A weed is but an unloved flower.

Ella Wilcox

The flowers of late winter and early spring occupy places in our hearts well out of proportion to their size.

Gertrude S. Wister

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
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,”

‘Tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes!
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written in Early Spring”

Even though flowers fall, don’t regret it. Even though weeds grow, don’t hate them. Don’t arouse the passions of attraction and repulsion, hating and loving. If only we don’t arouse the passions, the falling of flowers and the growing of weeds as they are is manifest absolute reality.

Zen Master Hakuun Yasutani