What greater delight is there than to
behold the earth apparelled with plants as with
a robe of embroidered works, set with Orient pearls and garnished with the great
diversitie of rare and costly jewels. But these delights are in the outward
senses.
The principle delight is in the minde, singularly enriched with the knowledge
of
these visible things, setting forth to us the invisible wisdome and admirable
workmanship of almighty God.
- John Gerard, 1633, The Herbal
There is no excellent beauty that
hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
- Francis Bacon
All gardeners live in beautiful
places because they make them so.
- Joseph Joubert
"Remember, it is forbidden to
live in a town which has no garden or greenery."
- Kiddushin 4:12
The great challenge for the garden
designer is not to make the garden look natural,
but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural.
- Lawrence Halprin
Whatever is in any way beautiful has
its source of beauty in itself,
and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it.
- Marcus Aurelius
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
- Franz Kafka
Beauty is the adjustment of all parts
proportionately so that one
cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.
- Leon B. Alberti
Beauty as we feel it is something
indescribable;
what it is or what it means can never be said.
- George Santayana
Exhuberance is Beauty.
- William Blake
Perfection is achieved, not when
there is nothing more to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint Exupery
Better a diamond with
a flaw than a pebble without.
- Confucius
Beauty is the Mistress, the gardener Her slave.
All beautiful things disappear, and beauty is the memory of ideas.
Chrysanthemums in bloom over a carpet of dry leaves -
the contrasts and pathos of beauty.
A flower needs roots; beauty of society of minds.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions
Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The artist is the only lover; he
alone has the pure vision of beauty,
and love is the vision of the soul when it is permitted to gaze upon immortal beauty.
- Isadora Duncan
Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see
Over the verge of the sundown
The beauty that is to be.
- Bliss Carman
Beauty is excrescence,
superabundance, random ebulience,
and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own right.
- Donald Culross Peattie, An Almanac for Moderns
There is no spot of ground, however
arid, bare or ugly,
that cannot be tamed into such a state as may give an
impression of beauty and delight.
- Gertrude Jekyll
Lord, make us mindful of the little things that grow and
blossom
in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
- W.E.B. du Bois
Quotes for Gardeners
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes
Arranged
by Over 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Cliches, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Those who contemplate the
beauty of the earth find reserves
of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is a
symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds,
the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of
nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring
after the winter. The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural
world...are available to anyone who will place himself under the
influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life.
- Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
Always remember the beauty of the
garden, for there is peace.
- Author Unknown
Trees: Lore, Myths, Legends, Magick, Esoterica
Not
only in grass fields with green leaf and running brook did this
constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with living human
beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of forms, ravished
and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome and end
of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers, pure
water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression;
the scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and
sunshine brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest
and longest, and down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of
that shape the swelling muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew
or curve of bust, Aphrodite or Hercules, it is the same. That I may
have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let the divine beauty
bring to me divine soul.
- Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart
“A man should hear a little
music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life,
in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful
implanted in the human soul.”
- Johann Wolfgang Goethe
It is only necessary to behold the
least fact or phenomenon,
however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from
our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by
its beauty and significance ... To perceive freshly, with
fresh senses is to be inspired.
- Henry David Thoreau
Art consists of limitation. The
most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
- G. K. Chesterton
Most of us have lost that sense of
unity of biosphere and humanity which
would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us
do not today believe that whatever the ups and down of detail within
our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful.
- Gregory Bateson
Over fertilized plants may be beautiful but
are otherwise useless, like people whose energies
are devoted so completely to their appearance that there is no other development.
- William Longgood
Is
it wholly fantastic to admit the possibility that Nature herself
strove
toward what we call beauty? Face to face with any one
of the
elaborate flowers which man's cultivation has had nothing
to do with, it
does not seem fantastic to me. We put survival first.
But when
we have a margin of safety left over, we expend it in the
search for the
beautiful. Who can say that
Nature does not do the same?
- Joseph
Wood Krutch
Lord of the far horizons,
Give us the eyes to see:
Over the verge of the sundown,
The beauty that is to be.
- Bliss Carman
If you truly love Nature, you will
find beauty everywhere.
- Vincent Van Gogh
Living Nature, not dull art
Shall plan my ways and rule my Heart.
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
Beautiful nature matters more than beautiful
people.
- Dana Bisbee
By plucking her petals,
You do not gather the beauty of the flower.
- Rabindrath Tagore
The foundations of the world are to
be found,
not in the cognitive experience of conscious thought,
but in the aesthetic experience of everyday life.
- Alfted North Whitehead
Remember that the most beautiful
things in the world are the most useless;
peacocks and lilies, for example.
- John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
The beautiful rests on the foundations of the necessary.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is like summer fruits which
are easy to corrupt and cannot last.
- Frances Bacon
What was any art but a mould in which
to imprison for a moment the shining,
elusive element which is life itself.
- Willa Cather
A garden, the, is a finite place, in
which a gardener (or several
gardeners) has created, working with or against nature, a plot
whose intention it is to provide pleasure; possibly in the form
of beauty, possibly in the form of cabbages - and possibly,
beautiful cabbages.
- Abby Adams, The Gardener's Gripe Book
My soul can find no staircase to
Heaven
unless it be through Earth's lovliness.
- Michelangelo Buonardo
When I am working on a problem I
never think about beauty.
I only think about how to solve the problem.
But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
- Buckminster Fuller
Remember how in that
communion only, beholding beauty with
the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images
of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a
reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become
the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.
- Plato, Symposium
Let me define a garden as the meeting
of raw nature and the
human imagination in which both seek the fulfillment of their
beauty. Every sign indicates that nature wants us and wishes
for collaboration with us, just as we long for nature to be fulfilled
in us. If our original state was to live in a garden, as Adam and
Eve did, then a garden signals our absolute origins as well as our
condition of eternity, while life outside the garden is
time and temporality.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life,
p. 96
Plainness has its peculiar
temptations quite as much as beauty.
- George Eliot
Novelty is an essential attribute of the beautiful.
- Benjamin Disraeli
Beauty is not caused. It is.
- Emily Dickinson
Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt of God.
- Jean Anouilh
I do not wish to die--
There is such contingent beauty in life:
The open window on summer mornings
Looking out on gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of roses flowering to themselves--
Images of time and eternity--
Silence in the garden and felt along the walls.
- A. L. Rowse
If delight may provoke men's labour,
what greater delights is there
then to behold the earth as apparelled with plants, as with a robe
of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with
great diversitie of rare and costly jewels? . . . The delight is great
but the use greater, and joyned often with necessitie.
- John Gerarde
"All the beings of the world
pray," said my Grandad ...
"Each living thing gives its life to the beauty of all life,
and that gift is its prayer."
- Douglas Wood, Grandad's
Prayers of the Earth.
Confronted with the vision of a
beautiful garden,
we see something beautiful about ourselves.
- Jeff Cox
Because in particular moments, in the
dusk of a late May evening,
when everything glows, when green seems greener than you've ever
seen it before, and the roses you planted are beginning to flower,
future tasks don't matter, neither do past worries - because you
witness a perfect moment of soul-restoring beauty.
- Turning
Earth
Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be
beauty.
There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
- Navajo Song
A thing of beauty is a job forever.
- Milton Berle
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me and about me, I walk,
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
- Navaho Night Chant, Looking Far West
The phrase "beautiful colour'',
for example, can have a hundred meanings,
depending on the occasion on which we use it. Very often the adjectives
we use are those applicable to the face of a person. This is the case with
"beautiful" and "ugly". Consider how we learn such words.
We do not
as children discover the quality of beauty or ugliness in a face and find that
these are qualities a tree has in common with it. The words "beautiful"
and
"ugly'' are bound up with the words they modify, and when applied to a face
are not the same as when applied to flowers and trees. We have in the latter
a similar "game".
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures
on Philosophy
The cottage garden; most for use
designed,
Yet not of beauty destitute.
- Charlotte Smith
As one grows older one should grow more expert at finding beauty
in unexpected places, in deserts and even in towns,
in ordinary human faces and among wild weeds.
- C.C.Vyvyan
It has been the office of art to
educate the perception of beauty.
We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
You do not need to
know anything about a plant
to know that it is beautiful.
- Montagu Don
Develop interest in life as you see
it; in people, things, literature,
music - the world is so rich,
simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls
and interesting people.
Forget yourself.
- Henry Miller
As every real estate agent knows, a poor
house in good surroundings will sell for a higher price
than a better house in poor surroundings, and in a town they confidently ask 25
percent
more rent for a flat with a view of a park that for an identical flat with no view.
- Nan Fairbrother
Order is the shape upon which beauty
depends.
- Pearl S. Buck
If you would have a lovely garden,
you should live a lovely life.
- Shaker saying
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself
in a mirror.
- Kahlil Gibran
It seemed to my friend that the
creation of a landscape-garden
offered to the proper muse the most magnificent of opportunities.
Here indeed was the fairest field for the display of the imagination,
in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty.
- Edgar Allan Poe
"Garden," "park"
and "wood" are thus synonymous in
our times with the ideas of beauty, naturalness and health.
- Tornsten O. Enge
In order to comprehend the beauty of
a Japanese garden, it is necessary to
understand - or at least to learn to understand - the beauty of stone.
- Lafcadio Hearn
Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that
is all ye know on Earth,
and all ye need to know.
- John Keats (1795-1821)
Flowers - Quotes for Gardeners
A garden is a lovesome thing, God
wot!
- T.E. Brown, 1887
Beauty is momentary in the mind -
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The Body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of Winter, done repenting.
- Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955, Peter Quince and the Clavier
We have descended into the garden and caught
three hundred slugs.
How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so
lifelike.
- Evelyn Underhill
Beauty of whatever kind, in its
supreme development,
invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
- Edgar Allen Poe
I cannot believe that the inscrutable
universe turns on an axis of suffering;
surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!
- Louise Bogan
I think the main culprit is modernity itself.
Modernity and beauty simply don't mix.
Pragmatism and an industrial-sized busyness denigrate everything that can't squeeze
out of a calculator. And the first thing to die under such circumstances is a passion
for beauty. For those trying desperately to jump over moving hurdles, pursuing beauty
is just foolishness. .... We just don't have the
time for poetry; beauty isn't useful,
we say, until we're in our eighties, when many finally reflect and realize
that beauty
was truly essential to a good life that has now slipped by.
- Douglas Jones, Men Hate Poetry
"It seemed to my friend that the creation of a
landscape-garden offered
to the proper muse the most magnificent of
opportunities. Here indeed
was the fairest field for the display of the
imagination, in the endless
combining of forms of novel beauty."
- Poe
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an
ornament, not a necessity, of life....
Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in
these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this
distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A
useless member of society, considered in terms of economics,
he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to
share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.
- Vita Sackville-West, 1892-1962
In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences,
which we must discover through observation and experiment.
- Montagu Don
Death is the mother of beauty.
- Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning, 1915
Ring the bells that still
can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets it.
- Leonard Cohen
Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger.
There is really nothing to be said about it.
It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all
- W. Somerset Maugham
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Beauty - Quotes for Gardeners.
This document was first distributed on the Internet in January, 1999.
Cuttings by Michael P. Garofalo
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong
Valley Spirit Journal by Michael P. Garofalo
Pulling Onions by Michael P. Garofalo
Valley Spirit Photography Gallery