Garden Beauty Quotes & Sayings

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

The leader acknowledges and eradicates the weeds in the garden, but keeps vision on the beauty they are creating and not on the weeds they are destroying — Christopher Babson

What comes from sorrow, watered by tears, grows something of beauty. A salt garden. And so this I leave behind. A harvest for those who find their way into my life and I into theirs. — Cindy McCormick Martinusen

April 10: Marilyn appears on time for six hours of costume tests for Something's Got to Give. She is irritated that Cukor is not there to meet her. She looks radiant, and Peter Levathes tells the press, "This will be the best Monroe picture ever. Marilyn is at the peak of her beauty and ability." But that evening, producer Henry Weinstein finds her sprawled across a bed and unconscious after an overdose of barbiturates. He calls Ralph Greenson, who revives her. It is announced to the press that Marilyn will be part of the entertainment at the president's Madison Square Garden birthday party. Marilyn agrees to pay $1,440.33 for the cost of producing a dress decorated with hand-stitched rhinestones, beading, and mirrors. — Carl Rollyson

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. — Charles Lamb

Havana was a woman who had once been renowned for her beauty until hard times had soured her. Her hand had gotten heavy with makeup application: her necklines had crept down; her beauty was tainted with vulgarity. But sometimes when she was alone, after she'd taken off her makeup, she danced in her garden, bare-faced and barefoot, to an old bolero, and the old elegance appeared, normal as a Tuesday evening. — Julia Cooke

All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and your are the mirror. — Kahlil Gibran

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

In the garden there was nothing which was not quite like themselves - nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them - the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs. If there had been one person in that garden who had not known through all his or her innermost being that if an Egg were taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end ... there could have been no happiness even in that golden springtime air. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.
Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
— Anne Rice

Beauty is the garden scent of roses, murmuring water flowing gently ... Can words describe the indescribable? — Rumi

Whether that lady's gentle mind,
No longer with the form combined
Which scattered love, as stars do light,
Found sadness where it left delight,

I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,

It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.

That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odors there,
In truth have never passed away:
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.

For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death or change: their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.

(--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge) — Percy Bysshe Shelley

What if you have seen it before, ten thousand times over? An apple tree in full blossom is like a message, sent fresh from heaven to earth, of purity and beauty. — Henry Ward Beecher

The moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. — Anita Desai

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys - — Hermann Hesse

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

It's the simple truth that mortal men cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower, while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amidst the beauty of a country garden. Why chance, sheer random chance, plays such an overwhelming role in the life lines and fate lines of men. — Guy Gavriel Kay

I love the beauty of nature. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Love is wild; its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers. — Osho

'Green Garden' is about beauty and joy and lush green and dance and excitement and smiling from within. — Laura Mvula

Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go back to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left in untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden. — Nhat Hanh

A rose lay open in full bloom
and, looking from my garden room,
I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.
It seemed so fragile,
resting there,
and such a silence filled the air,
the beauty of the moment caused me pain.
"What more?" I thought. "There must be more."
As if in answer then, I saw
one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.
It trembled, then cascaded down
to earth just staining gentle brown
and, since then, I've felt different.
That's all. — Julie Andrews Edwards

If a fool plants a beautiful garden, is he still a fool? — Marty Rubin

To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it's with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I'm alive. But I feel I've not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I'm full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never. And all this I gained when I stopped loving you. — Clarice Lispector

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. - RALPH WALDO EMERSON — Lama Surya Das

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. — Savitri Devi

Family is the garden of humanity where every flower grows with love and kindness, in search of beauty, purpose and happiness. — Debasish Mridha

Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark,swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora. — Ketzel Levine

I find one vast garden spread out all over the universe. All plants, all human beings, all higher mind bodies are about in this garden in various ways, each has his own uniqueness and beauty. Their presence and variety give me great delight. Every one of you adds with his special feature to the glory of the garden. — Anandamayi Ma

We ought to discover the beauty of creation through a walk in nature. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Beyond its practical aspects, gardening - be it of the soil or soul - can lead us on a philosophical and spiritual exploration that is nothing less than a journey into the depths of our own sacredness and the sacredness of all beings. After all, there must be something more mystical beyond the garden gate, something that satisfies the soul's attraction to beauty, peace, solace, and celebration. — Christopher McDowell

The Garden Under Snow
Now the garden is under snow
a blank page our footprints write on
clare who was never mine
but always belonged to herself
Sleeping Beauty
a crystalline blanket
this is her spring
this is her sleeping/awakening
she is waiting
everything is waiting
the improbable shapes of roots
my baby
her face
a garden, waiting. — Audrey Niffenegger

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty and curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All gardeners live in beautiful places because they make them so. — Joseph Joubert

Today I have nothing to do except to enjoy the garden, drink the beauty of nature, and feel the joy of love and life. — Debasish Mridha

A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.
We feel the flowing water of life here,
you and I, with the garden's beauty
and the birds singing.
The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
what it is to be a thin crescent moon.
You and I unselfed, will be together,
indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.
The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar
as we laugh together, you and I.
In one form upon this earth,
and in another form in a timeless sweet land. — Rumi

In every building, in every garden, at every turn the visitor finds the austere beauty and simplicity of color and form that are the Mountain ideal. The overall impression that one carries away is of tranquillity and joy in the natural world. The chosen simplicity of life there may lead the visitor to question his own choice in life. — Robin Hobb

Just like an angel, the lovely one and the cute
All the beauty together in your funny sulky looks
Innocent, like the kids, like the pigeons in my garden
Magnetic attraction, awesome, amazing and the super astute
Immortal charming, like the moon and the stars
Elegant, stylish, you must be very tasty, fruit — M.F. Moonzajer

In the morning of the world," he said, "when the dew still lay upon the Garden, man was created so that there might be some one to enjoy it. In order that he might relish beauty, he was given a soul; and having a soul, he was given speech, since without speech, it is impossible to understand such abstractions as the soul. That was a mistake, but I do not see how it could have been avoided. — Robert Nathan

It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace. — Peter Heller

I think that her life was about finding the extraordinary in every day. It was how she could sit in her garden on a rainy day and see the beauty in it. It's what got her out of bed every morning. — Karen White

In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death. — Sam Llewellyn

Don't go outside your house to see flowers. My friend, don't bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit. Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty inside the body and out of it, before gardens and after gardens. — Robert Bly

. . .in your light, had I learned to love, here
in your beauty, could I speak
knowing of this space close within
as the breath held inside a garden rose, there -
there is no time. — John Daniel Thieme

How often I admire the taste shown in the garden which, within the house, may be indifferent. Here is an art which is today probably more perfect than at any previous time, one which does not break with the past, while it brings a sense of comely order, and a radiant beauty, to cottage and manor alike. — William Rothenstein

Even though May came in accompanied by rain, all the fields were bright with the loveliest green imaginable. A sunbeam pierced a little gap in the dark sea of cloud, and the world laughed and glittered in the light of heaven. I stood there marveling and thought, Does God take us for fools, that he should light up the world for us with such
consummate beauty in the radiance of his glory, in his honor? And nothing, on the other hand, but rapine and murder? Where does the truth lie? Should one go off and build a little house with flowers outside the windows and a garden outside the door and extol and thank God and turnone's back on the world and its filth? Isn't seclusion a form of treachery of desertion? I'm weak and puny, but I want to do what is right. — Hans Scholl

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time. — Wallace Stegner

Re-programming your mind, body & spirit is like planting a garden, if the soil isn't right nothing will grow. — Nikki Rowe

The poet believed that 'Beauty' first entered the world not at its creation, nor with the first garden, the first sunrise, the birth of the first man and woman and their first sexual act. The poet believed that 'Beauty' entered the world the day the first child blushed. — Roman Payne

Everyone can identify with a fragrant garden, with beauty of sunset, with the quiet of nature, with a warm and cozy cottage. — Thomas Kincade

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the grandparents grieve because the garden represents something more than a resource to be divided. It is a symbol of community and beauty. — Ken Follett

There ought to be gardens for all months in the year, in which, severally, things of beauty may be then in season. — Francis Bacon

Must you know that yours will be the "better" picture before you pick up the brush and paint? Can it not simply be another picture? Another expression of beauty?
Must a rose be "better" than an iris in order to justify it's existence?
I tell you this: you are all flowers in the Garden of the Gods. — Neale Donald Walsch

Nothing which did not understand the wonderfulness of what was happening to them
the immense, tender, terrible, heart-breaking beauty and solemnity of Eggs ... if an Egg were to be taken away or hurt the whole world would whirl round and crash through space and come to an end ... — Frances Hodgson Burnett

When they told me in the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. — Jojo Moyes

The field was carpeted with the most lustrous show of wildflowers she had ever seen - flowers by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. Purple irises. White lilies. Pink daisies. Yellow buttercups and red columbines and many others she knew no names for. A breeze had arisen; the sun had broken through the clouds. She shrugged off her pack and walked slowly forward. It was as if she were wading into a sea of pure color. The tips of her fingers brushed the petals of the flowers as she passed. They seemed to bow their heads in salutation, welcoming her into their embrace. In a trance of beauty, Amy moved among them. Corridors of golden sunshine fell over the field; far away, across the sea, a new age had begun.
Here she would make her garden. She would make her garden, and wait. — Justin Cronin

A smile is the flower that grows in the garden of the heart to beautify and attract the butterflies of life. — Debasish Mridha

Too much beauty can be hard to bear. — Nancy Garden

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty.
'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.'
They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'.
'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me. — Muriel Spark

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity.
The garden is about life and beauty and the impermanence of all living things.
The garden is about feeding your children, providing food for the tribe.
It's part of an urgent territorial drive that we can probably trace back to animals storing food.
It's a competitive display mechanism, like having a prize bull, this greed for the best tomatoes and English tea roses.
It's about winning; about providing society with superior things; and about proving that you have taste, and good values, and you work hard.
And what a wonderful relief, every so often, to know who the enemy is.
Because in the garden, the enemy is everything: the aphids, the weather, time.
And so you pour yourself into it, care so much, and see up close so much birth, and growth, and beauty, and danger, and triumph.
And then everything dies anyway, right?
But you just keep doing it. — Anne Lamott

In Nina Kimbereley's garden the scabiosa flowers were dark as garnet brooches; the nicotiana a veil of tossing crimson stars. Nothing was usual, or a dull color. All was exceptional, designed to be exceptional since it had been planned as the background for a beauty by the beauty. — Elizabeth Enright

There are many gods ... gods of beauty and magic, gods of the garden, gods in our own backyards, but we go off to foreign countries to find new ones, we reach to the stars to find new ones
... The god of the church is a jealous god; he cannot live in peace with other gods. — Rudolfo Anaya

The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty. — John Carroll

Do not focus your thoughts among the confused wheels of secondary causes, as -'O if this had been, this had not followed!' Look up to the master motion of the first wheel. In building, we see hewn stones and timbers under hammers and axes, yet the house in this beauty we do not see at the present, but it is in the mind of this builder. We also see unbroken clods, furrows, and stones, but we do not see the summer lilies, roses, and the beauty of a garden. Even so we do not presently see the outcome of God's decrees with his blessed purpose. It is hard to believe when his purpose is hidden and under the ground. Providence has a thousand keys to deliver his own even when all hope is gone. Let us be faithful and care for our own part, which is to do and suffer for him, and lay Christ's part on himself and leave it there; duties are ours, events are the Lord's. — Samuel Rutherford

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

A garden is a thing of beauty and a job forever. — Richard Briers

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

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

Anyone who has a garden, park or orchard tree has an opportunity to ensure that it offers protection, brings beauty and bears fruit for future generations. In short, every one of us should aspire to be a forester. — Gabriel Hemery

A person's sense of morality and responsibility to other human beings, must not come from a professed faith or belief system. Because when it does - it is merely a projection and not an internalization. A person must be able to say "I believe this, I do this, I say this, because this is who I am; not because I see myself as a member of so and so belief system." Adam and Eve walked with God every day in the garden of Eden and yet, they still chose their own way. This only means that their own way had nothing to do with God's way. Even if they walked with God physically, daily, in a garden! This is witness to the fact that your sense of morality and responsibility must be incarnated within you. In fact, this is the beauty of God - to unfold your own spirit within you - and then you see your own spirit and say that it is indeed beautiful. — C. JoyBell C.

Hope is not just one single quality or promise. Hope has to do with believing beyond today - knowing there's a garden of beauty that awaits me. — Joyce Rupp

The fame of Maria Foote's beauty and charm of manner had reached London, and in May 1814, she made her first appearance at Covent Garden Theatre and personated Amanthis in 'The Child of Nature' with such grace and effect that the manager complimented her with an immediate engagement. — Sabine Baring-Gould

He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh. — Diana Gabaldon

Well I do find the beauty in animals. I find beauty everywhere. I find beauty in my garden. — Doris Day

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. — Aberjhani

My love, you are closer to me than myself ...
You shine through my eyes,
Your light is brighter than the Moon ...
Step into the garden so all the flowers ...
Even the tall poplar can kneel before your beauty ...
Let your voice silence the lily famous for its hundred tongues,
When you want to be kind ...
You are softer than the soul ...
But when you withdraw ...
You can be so cold and harsh.
Dear one, you can be wild and rebellious ...
But when you meet him face to face ...
His charm will make you docile like the earth,
Throw away your shield and bare your chest ...
There is no stronger protection than him.
That's why when the Lover withdraws from the world ...
He covers all the cracks in the wall ...
So the outside light cannot come though,
He knows that only the inner light illuminates his world! — Rumi

Beauty was worth
Its every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending,
As darkness covered the garden that is the earth. — Hayden Carruth

Nature displays beauty in its pure state. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Light - both physical and moral - was a central concern to the men and women living in the medieval age. They attempted to explore its properties in the colors of a stained glass canopy, in the tenor of a brisk saltarello, in the lilt of a Jongleur's ballad, in the sweet savor of a banqueting table, in the rhapsody of a well planned garden, indeed, in every arena and discipline of life. — Douglas Wilson Douglas Jones

All the shall stand about the God of glory, the fountain of love, as it were opening their bosoms to be filled with those effusions of love which are poured forth from thence, as the flowers on the earth in a pleasant spring day open their bosoms to the sun to be filled with his warmth and light, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy by his rays. Every saint is as a flower in the garden of God, and holy love is the fragrancy and sweet odor which they all send forth, with which they fill that paradise. — Jonathan Edwards

Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful. — C.S. Lewis

Life is like a garden. Quite naturally, leaves wither and flowers fade. Only if we clear the decay of the past then and there can we really enjoy the beauty of the new leaves and flowers. Likewise, we must clear the murkiness of the past bad experiences from our minds. Life is remembrance in forgetfulness. Forgive what ought to be forgiven; forget what ought to be forgotten. Let us embrace life with renewed vigor. We should be able to face every moment of life with renewed expectation, like a freshly blossomed flower. — Mata Amritanandamayi

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. — Meg Rosoff

Beauty is what I feel my life is about - the garden, the house, whatever. I see the world that way, yet it isn't. — Julie Newmar

What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain. — Victor Hugo

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. — Marcel Proust

Confronted with the vision of a beautiful garden, we see something beautiful about ourselves. — Jeff Cox

The picture had no flourishes, but she liked its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that pervaded it. It spoke of the kind of personal issue that touched her most nearly; of the choice between objects, subjects, contacts - what might she call them? - of a thin and those of a rich association; of a lonely, studious life in a lovely land; of an old sorrow that sometimes ached to-day; of a feeling of pride that was perhaps exaggerated, but that had an element of nobleness; of a care for beauty and perfection so natural and so cultivated together that the career appeared to stretch beneath it in the disposed vistas and with the ranges of steps and terraces and fountains of a formal Italian garden - allowing only for arid places freshened by the natural dews of a quaint half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood. — Henry James

Miss Manette!'
The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and kept her hand drawn through his arm.
'Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.'
To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd. Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again.
'Miss Manette, have you ever seen the prisoner before?'
'Yes, sir. — Charles Dickens

He was seated on the bench now. He had his left elbow on his knee, his right arm across his lap, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. White face, red hair: snow and fire, like something from an old tale. The book I had noticed earlier was on the bench beside him, its covers shut. Around Anluan's feet and in the birdbath, small visitors to the garden hopped and splashed and made the most of the day that was becoming fair and sunny. He did not seem to notice them. As for me, I found it difficult to take my eyes from him. There was an odd beauty in his isolation and his sadness, like that of a forlorn prince ensorcelled by a wicked enchantress, or a traveller lost forever in a world far from home. — Juliet Marillier

Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers. — Isaac Asimov

Jesus' mission wasn't to improve the old; his mission, and the mission he gave his disciples, was to embody the new - an entirely new way of doing life. It is life lived within the reign of God; life centered on God as the sole source of one's security, worth, and significance; life lived free from self-protective fear; and life manifested in Calvary-like service to others. His promise is that as his disciples manifest the unique beauty and power of this life, it will slowly and inconspicuously - like a mustard seed - grow and take over the garden. — Gregory A. Boyd

People are always asking, "What's the purpose of life?" That's easy. Relieve suffering. Create beauty. Make gardens. — Dan Barker

The cottage garden; most for use designed, Yet not of beauty destitute. — Charlotte Smith

If on creation's morn the king of heaven
To shrubs and flowers a sovereign lord had given,
O beauteous rose, he had anointed thee
Of shrubs and flowers the sovereign lord to be;
The spotless emblem of unsullied truth,
The smile of beauty and the glow of youth,
The garden's pride, the grace of vernal bowers,
The blush of meadows, and the eye of flowers. — Henry George Bohn

The field was covered with ice crystals sticking up like a garden of little diamonds. Sophia was beside her now, and the two animals walked slowly into the crystal blossoms. Flora was enchanted.

For a moment she forgot she was hungry, tired, and ill-equipped to make this journey. She forgot to worry about Oscar. She forgot to worry that there would never be a useful job for her. She kicked up her front hooves with each step and watched the ice crystals scatter in front of her. — Chris Kurtz

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. — Rumi

Flowers speak to us if we listen. Appreciating the blossom in hand or pausing in the garden to admire the beauty quiets our outer selves till we hear something new, something we did not hear before - the still, small voice of Nature herself. — Jean Hersey

It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns ... It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it ... If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love. — C.S. Lewis

He Said...

Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love. — Anne Spencer