Botanical Quotes & Sayings

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need - not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment. — John Muir

Sometimes I defy flower anatomy & other times I try and replicate it intricately! — Minnelli Lucy France

Lysenkoism: A forlorn attempt not merely to colonize the botanical kingdom, but to instill a proper sense of the puritan work ethic and the merits of self-improvement. — J.G. Ballard

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon. — D.H. Lawrence

And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find. — Haruki Murakami

Our gardening forebears meant watermelon to be the juicy, barefoot taste of a hot summer's end, just as a pumpkin is the trademark fruit of late October. Most of us accept the latter, and limit our jack-o'-latern activities to the proper botanical season. Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It's tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives. But it's actually possible to wait, celebrating each season when it comes, not fretting about its being absent at all other times because something else good is at hand. — Barbara Kingsolver

For disease prevention, berries of all colors have "emerged as champions," according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn't known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells. — Michael Greger

Must look into the botanical background of substance known as hashish, I jotted in my journal, writing by the light of candles that grew incessantly jewel-like even as protean wafts of incense approached my snout like platters of ripe fruits borne on the back of Nubian pages. — Tom Robbins

He sighed. "You've chosen poorly, you know. When we return to England you'll be celebrated, just as I will be. If you've decided to abandon me, you might have netted someone titled, someone with enough wealth to see you esteemed and me able to continue my botanical studies. That would have been the aim of a dutiful daughter."
"I'm not abandoning you, and I chose Shaw. You're the one who declined to attend your daughter's wedding."
"You never used to speak to me like this. A dutiful child would never have accepted a proposal from the first man who asked, simply because he did ask."
"He didn't propose to me. I proposed to him."
Finally he looked more surprised than angry and frustrated. "You proposed to him?"
"Yes, because I didn't think he believed me when I said that I loved him. I can hardly blame him, since I had to think about it for an entire day after he said it to me, but I do love him. More than I can articulate to you. — Suzanne Enoch

Dragon's blood, an extremely potent magical material, surely ranks among the Top 20 most popular spell-casting ingredients. No need to emulate Saint George, dragon's blood is the resin from Dracaena draco, an Indonesian tree. Unlike most resins it's red, hence the name. If you burn it, it does indeed bear a resemblance to blood. (There is also another dragon's blood, used in Peruvian magic. This one, too, is a botanical substance, although completely distinct from the Indonesian resin.) — Judika Illes

Finally, there are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs. First, use of these
drugs may be dangerous. However, every worth-while exploration is dangerous--climbing
mountains, testing aircraft, rocketing into outer space, skin diving, or collecting botanical
specimens in jungles. But if you value knowledge and the actual delight of exploration more
than mere duration of uneventful life, you are willing to take the risks. It is not really healthy
for monks to practice fasting, and it was hardly hygienic for Jesus to get himself crucified,
but these are risks taken in the course of spiritual adventures. — Alan W. Watts

People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings. — Timothy Leary

The Copse at Hurstbourne is one of those fancy-sounding titles for a brand-new tract of condominiums on the outskirts of town. 'Copse' as in 'a thicket of small trees.' 'Hurst' as in 'hillock, knoll, or mound.' And 'bourne' as in 'brook or stream.' All of these geological and botanical wonders did seem to conjoin within the twenty parcels of the development, but it was hard to understand why it couldn't have just been called Shady Acres, which is what it was. Apparently people aren't willing to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a home that doesn't sound like it's part of an Anglo-Saxon land grant. These often quite utilitarian dwellings are never named after Jews or Mexicans. Try marketing Rancho Feinstein if you want to lose money in a hurry. Or Paco Sanchez Park. Middle-class Americans aspire to tone, which is equated, absurdly, with the British gentry. — Sue Grafton

Some nine years before, Mr. Tan Chay Yan, scion of a well-known Peranakan Chinese family of Malacca, had converted his pepper garden into a rubber plantation. In 1897 this had seemed like a mad thing to do. Everyone had advised against it: rubber was known to be a risk. Mr. Ridley, the curator of the Singapore Botanical Gardens, had been trying for years to interest British planters in giving rubber a try. The imperial authorities in London had spent a fortune in arranging to have seed stocks stolen from Brazil. — Amitav Ghosh

Aromatherapy is more thoroughly defined as the skilled and controlled use of essential oils for physical and emotional health and well-being. Science is now confirming what has been known for centuries: essential oils have healing properties on both physical and emotional levels. Absorbed through the skin and via the olfactory-brain connection through inhalation, they have been considered among the most therapeutic and rejuvenating of all botanical extracts throughout the ages. — Valerie Gennari Cooksley

A flower is a daisy chain, a graduation, a valentine; a flower is New Year's Eve and an orchid in your hair; a flower is a single geranium blooming in a tin can on a murky city fire-escape; an acre of roses at the Botanical Gardens; and the first gold crocus of spring! ... a flower is a birth, a wedding, a leaving of this life. — Jean Hersey

Education is very important, and the botanical garden is the place to do that. I grew up in a semi-rural area and learned from that being my playground. — Nell Newman

Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs ... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance? — Nathaniel Hawthorne

What I mean is,' continued Amit, 'it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops down branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks. When you go to the Botanical Garden you'll see what I mean. It has its own life - but so do the snakes and birds and bees and lizards and termites that live in it and on it and off it. But then it's also like the Ganges in its upper, middle and lower courses - including its delta - of course. — Vikram Seth

He made two or three peculiar observations; as when shewn the botanical garden, 'Is not EVERY garden a botanical garden? — James Boswell

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree. — Gretel Ehrlich

Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them. — Victoria Finlay

It is easy to lose hope when all is lost. We do not realise that is just the beginning. That is just the catalyst. That is when we have to spread our wings like a butterfly. The rainy days will come but so will 'the botanical drawings' of life. Of kitchen tables, our mother's apron strings, cabbage roses and toys if we want to become the women our mother's were. There are so many careers for women to choose from today. Wherever they find themselves women will always find an abundance. — Abigail George

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, 'That is an oak tree', or 'that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Clearly, any well-kept garden will be a source of pleasure in the summer months; in the bleak urban midwinter, however, there are few activities more likely to energise the spirit than a botanical walk. — John Burnside

The easy glamour of the French Riviera in the late 1960s - inspired by Romy Schneider's character in La Piscine - mixed with garden elements. Blueprint, botanical, lattice, Queen Anne's lace and folly prints are paired with cleaner silhouettes and proportions in a fresh palette of green, white and coral. — Tory Burch

I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring Godful beauty. — John Muir

In the spring he will attend your botanical course. his natural turn is very strongly to the objects of your two courses of lectures, and I hope you will have reason to be contended with his capacity & character. — Thomas Jefferson

When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem 'with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse'.5 Aubrey Beardsley's caricature of Wilde, 'Oscar Wilde at Work', shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books. — Thomas Wright

To sum up: all nature-spirits are not the same as fairies; nor are all fairies nature-spirits. The same applies to the relationship of nature-spirits and the dead. But we may safely say that a large proportion of nature-spirits became fairies, while quite a number of the dead in some areas seem to take on the character of nature-spirits. We cannot expect any fixity of rule in dealing with barbaric thought. We must take it as it comes. It bears the same relationship to "civilized" or folk-lore theory as does the growth of the jungle to a carefully designed and meticulously labelled botanical garden. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed when writing of the barbaric confusion which underlies the creative function in poetry: 'What do you expect? You are among savages! — Lewis Spence

SURE-FIRE SINGLES AD:
Famous Writer needs woman to organize his life and spend his money. Loves to turn off Sunday football and go to the Botanical Gardens with that special someone. Will obtain plastic surgery if necessary. — Joe Bob Briggs

Doubtless many can recall certain books which have greatly influenced their lives, and in my own case one stands out especially-a translation of Hofmeister's epoch-making treatise on the comparative morphology of plants. This book, studied while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, was undoubtedly the most important factor in determining the trend of my botanical investigation for many years. — Douglas Houghton Campbell

Nevermore Tree was gargantuan, a word which here means 'having attained an inordinate amount of botanical volume. — Lemony Snicket

I ran from them. Nights, yellow lights
scoured sand. What was ever found
but women in skirts folded around the men
they loved that Friday? No one found me.
And how could that have been, here, where
even botanical names were recorded
and small roads mapped in red?
Night, the sky is black paper pecked with pinholes. — Deborah Ager

My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world. — Karl Blossfeldt

Town-planning," Geddes once wrote, "is not mere place-planning, nor even work-planning. If it is to be successful it must be folk-planning. This means that its task is . . . to find the right places for each sort of people; places where they will really flourish." These places, of course, are not really to be found, but have to be made. From his earliest designs for a botanical school garden and urban renewal work in Edinburgh to his latest building initiatives in Montpelier in southern France, Geddes pursued the creation of such places. He perceived himself as a gardener ordering the environment for the benefit of life. — Volker M. Welter

Sometimes when I am painting large flowers, I imagine that I am the bee. — Minnelli Lucy France

When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up. — Allen Lacy

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory - the way it's formed, maintained, connected, recalled - has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits - ones and zeros - that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between. — Nicholas Carr

The Indians' botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves. — Richard Evans Schultes

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment "already"? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a "cristallisation," so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different. — Czeslaw Milosz

The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that. — Janet Fitch

A sort of botanical glory-hole — John Wyndham

When i heard on the radio that the New York Panthers had been busted, i was furious. The so-called conspiracy charges were so stupid that even a fool could see through them. The police actually had the audacity to charge them with plotting to blow up the flowers in the Botanical Garden. — Assata Shakur

There are two specific objections to use of psychedelic drugs.First,use of these drugs may be dangerous.Howev er,every worth-while exploration is dangerous-climb ing mountains,testi ng aircraft,rocket ing into outer space,or collecting botanical specimens in jungles.But if you value knowledge & the actual delight of exploration more than mere duration of uneventful life,you are willing to take the risks. — Alan Watts

The word 'vegetable' has no precise botanical meaning in reference to food plants, and we find that almost all parts of plants have been employed as vegetables - roots (carrot and beet), stems (Irish potato and asparagus), leaves (spinach and lettuce), leaf stalk (celery and Swiss chard), bracts (globe artichoke), flower stalks and buds (broccoli and cauliflower), fruits (tomato and squash), seeds (beans), and even the petals (Yucca and pumpkin). — Charles Heiser

I adore the elegance of botanical realism but I also can't help but dream of my very own neo-surrealistic fantasy flowers, and so I paint and illustrate both; I always find myself between both of those worlds. — Minnelli Lucy France