James Gates Percival Quotes

What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

Even silence speaks.

The soul of a child is the loveliest flower that grows in the garden of God.

I've always thought my flowers had souls.

The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.

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 are plain, honest and upright, like the broad faced sunflower and the hollyhock.

When a daffadill I see, Hanging down his head towards me, Guess I may, what I must be: First, I shall decline my head; Secondly, I shall be dead: Lastly, safely buryed.

I read somewhere once that souls were like flowers,' said Priscilla. 'Then your soul is a golden narcissus,' said Anne, 'and Diana's is like a red, red rose. Jane's is an apple blossom, pink and wholesome and sweet.' 'And our own is a white violet, with purple streaks in its heart,' finished Priscilla.

roses are the only flowers at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic.

Also pay attention if a tree or whatnot says something about two bulls.

Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

I do love violets; they tell the history of woman's love.

As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.

Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.

Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept.

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen: A Chapel was built in the midst, Where I used to play on the green. And the gates of this Chapel were shut, And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door; So I turn'd to the Garden of Love, That so many sweet flowers bore. And I saw it was filled with graves, And tomb-stones where flowers should be: And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

If government ownership of land and natural resources was the best way to protect the environment, then we should have found a Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain came down. Instead, there was one environmental horror story after another.

I'm for a multi-racial world in which each race keeps to itself, in harmony with the other races. Like in a garden, you have flowerbeds of roses and flowerbeds of carnations and irises and different other flowers. They don't intermarry. They stay separate, and each one has its beauty. . . . I'm against colonialism for the reason that colonialism infects the master as well as the slave. It even infects the master more.

We stalk the truth as poets, sensualists, a duality, limited insanity. We labor in our muse, carving alphabets of experience into our hearts.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays-fear.

I sit before flowers 
hoping they will train me in the art 
of opening up

The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.

I end not far from my going forth By picking the faded blue Of the last remaining aster flower To carry again to you.