Florilegium

florilegium (noun): a collection of literary extracts or flowers

Page 2

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Their texture unfolds the mystery of its beauty to the deep-searching microscope, mocking the grossness of mortal vision. Shape seems to have exhausted its variety in their conformation; colour hath no shade, or combination, or delicacy of tint, which may not be found in flowers; and every modulation of fragrance is theirs.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

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

No man has a heart pure enough to interpret the freshness of flowers.
   ~Auguste Rodin

Rose, O you completely perfect thing,
always self-contained and yet
spilling yourself forever.
   ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty is the splendor of the Truth.
   ~ Plato

Fresh-smitten by the morning ray,
When thou art up, alert and gay,
Then, cheerful Flower! my spirits play.
   ~ Wordsworth

Flowers — of all things created most innocently simple and most superbly complex.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

Flowers are, in the volume of nature, what the expression, “God is love,” is in the volume of revelation.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

There is a flower that Bees prefer —
And Butterflies — desire
   ~ Emily Dickinson

All the parts of the universe are so constituted that nothing could be better for use or beauty.
   ~ Cicero

The different stages through which plants go while budding and flowering and bearing fruit delight the sight.
   ~ Philo

All fashioned with supremest grace
   ~ Mary Howitt

Like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower, the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired.
   ~ Plato

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
   ~ Walt Whitman

Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in Nature's works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful.
   ~ Aristotle

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
   ~ George Herbert

Is there nothing of expression in their aspect? Have they not eyeless looks and lipless eloquence?
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

The career of flowers differs from ours only inaudibleness.
   ~ Emily Dickinson

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

One cannot look closely at the structure of a flower without loving it. They are emblems and manifestations of God’s love to the creation, and they are the means and ministrations of man’s love to his fellow-creatures; for they first awaken in the mind a sense of the beautiful and the good.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

"To comfort man, — to whisper hope
Whene'er his faith is dim,
For whoso careth for the flowers
Will much more care for Him.”
   ~ Mary Howitt

The Goatsbeard spreads its golden rays,
But shuts its cautious petals up,
Retreating from the noon-tide blaze.
   ~ Charlotte Turner Smith

Is not the very loveliness of virtue, its disinterestedness, its uncalculating generosity, its confiding freeness, its apprehension of a beauty beyond advantage and above utility.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

Flowers, then, are man’s first spiritual instructors, initiating him into the knowledge, love, and apprehension of something above sensualness and selfishness.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

Children love flowers, childhood is the age of flowers, of innocence, and beauty and love of beauty. Flowers to them are nature’s smiles.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

Flowers . . . are the first instructors to emancipate our thoughts from the grossness of materialism; they make us think of invisible beings; and, by means of so beautiful and graceful a transition, our thoughts of the invisible are thoughts of the good.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

The very inutility of flowers is their excellence and great beauty; for, by having a delightfulness in their very form and colour, they lead us to thoughts of generosity and moral beauty detached from and superior to all selfishness; so that they are pretty lessons in nature’s book of instruction, teaching man that he liveth not by bread or for bread alone, but that he hath another than an animal life.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
   ~ William Blake

And in this fair region everything that grows—trees, and flowers, and fruits—are in a like degree fairer than any here.
   ~ Plato

What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile, a feast without a welcome.
   ~ William Pitt Scargill

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