garden quotes

  • God Almighty first planteda garden; and indeed, it isthe purest of human pleasures.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.46,'Of Gardens'.

  • And the L God planted a garden eastwards in Eden; and there he put the manwhom he had formed. And out of the ground made the L God to grow every tree that is pleasant for the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    ORDORDGenesis 2:8^9.

  • And when the woman saw that the tree wasgood for food, and that it waspleasanttothe eyes,and atreetobe desired to make one wise she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also to her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them bothwere opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons. And they heard the voice of the L God walking inthegarden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the L God amongst the trees of the garden.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    ORDORDGenesis 3:6^8. In the GenevaBible of1560, the word'aprons'was rendered'breeches', and the versionwas therefore known as the Breeches Bible.

  •    A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Song of Solomon 4:12.

  • 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.

    -William Blake
      Songs of Experience,'The Garden of Love'.

  • The courts of Europe are a jungle, compared to which your jungles here are a well-kept garden.

    - Robert Oxton Bolt
      Linedeliveredby Ray Mc Anally as Cardinal  Altamirano in The Mission.

  • When Adam and Eve were dispossessed Of the garden hard by Heaven, They planted another one down in the west, 'Twas Devon, glorious Devon!

    - Sir Harold Edwin Boulton
      'Glorious Devon'.

  • There is a garden in her face, Where roses and white lilies grow, A heavenly paradise is that place, Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow. There cherries grow, which none may buy Till 'Cherry ripe!'themselves do cry.

    -Thomas Campion
      Fourth Book of  Airs,'There is a Garden in her Face'.

  • The Muses'garden, with pedantic weeds O'erspread, was purged by thee; the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted.

    -Thomas Carew
      'An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr.  John Donne'.

  • The gallows in my garden, people say, Is new and neat and adequately tall.

    - G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
      'Ballade of Suicide'.

  • God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.

    - Abraham Cowley
      Essays, in Verse and Prose,'The Garden'.

  •    Let 'Dig for Victory' be the motto of everyone with a garden and of every able-bodied man and woman capable of digging an allotment in their spare time.

    - Sir Reginald Hugh Doram-Smith
      Radio broadcast, 3 Oct.

  • So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf, to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she- bear coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. 'What! no soap?' So he died and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyulies, and the Grand Panjandrumhimself, withthelittleround buttonat top; and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as- catch-can till the gunpowder ran out of theheels of their boots.

    - Samuel Foote
    Responding to a challenge from the actor Charles Macklin that there was no speech he could not repeat from memory after just one hearing. Macklin had to acknowledge defeat. Foote's phrases 'no soap'and 'the grand Panjandrum' became widely adopted. Quoted in Maria Edgeworth Harry and Lucy (1825), vol.2.

  • The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the birds for mirth, One is nearer God's Heart in a garden Than anywhere else on earth.

    - Dorothy Frances Gurney
      'God's Garden'.

  • My VanGoghisbetter than Irises.Ihavethewholegarden.

    - Armand Hammer
    On ranking his own Van Gogh, Hospital at Saint-Re  my, over the Irises that brought »53.9 million at auction. In Connoisseur,  Jan 1991.

  • Our England is a garden that is full of stately views, Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues, With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by; But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The Glory of the Garden'.

  • Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made By singing:'Oh, how beautiful!'and sitting in the shade, While better men than we go out and start their working lives At grubbing weeds from gravel paths with broken dinner-knives.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The Glory of the Garden'.

  • Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away! 474

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The Glory of the Garden'.

  • I have a garden of my own, But so with roses overgrown, And lilies, that you would it guess To be a little wilderness.

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn' (published1681).

  • Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou paradise of four seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery if not flaming sword; What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal, and thee waste?

    - Andrew Marvell
    c.1650^1652  'Upon  Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax' (published1681), stanza 41.

  • Here one is in Later Life, and it's perfectly pleasant really, not for a moment that garden of cactus and sour grapes I'd always assumed it must be.

    -James Ingram Merrill
      Letter to a friend at age 46.

  • Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude.

    -John Milton
      Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.3, l.65^9.

  • Que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d'elle, et encore plus de monjardinimparfait. I would like death to come to me while I am planting cabbages, caring little for death and even less for the imperfection of my garden.

    - Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
      Essais, bk.1, ch.20 (translated by Charles Cotton).

  • The media have, indeed, provided the Devil with perhaps the greatest opportunity accorded him since Adam and Eve were turned out of the Garden of Eden.

    - Malcolm Muggeridge
      Christ and the Media, introduction.

  •    When I make a portrait,I cannot limit it tothe lines of the head, for that head belongs toa body, it exists ina setting which influences it, it is part of a totality that I cannot suppress. The impression you produce upon me is not thesame if I catchsight of youalone ina gardenor if Isee you in the midst of a group of other people, in a living room or on the street.

    - Medardo Rosso
    Quoted in Edmond Claris De l'impressionisme en sculpture, 'Medardo Rosso' (1902).

  • If Everton were playing down at the bottom of my garden, I'd draw the curtains.

    - Bill (William) Shankly
    Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  • A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew. 785

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'The Sensitive Plant', pt.1, l.1.

  • Beauteous the fleet before the gale; Beauteous the multitudes in mail, Rank'd arms and crested heads: Beauteous the garden's umbrage mild, Walk, water, meditated wild, And all the bloomy beds.

    - Christopher Smart
      A Song to David, stanza 78.

  • In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island, The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads (2nd edn),'A Forsaken Garden'.

  • Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; Maud And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky.

    -Tennyson
      Maud, pt.1, sect.22, stanza1, l.850^9.

  • Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls.

    -Tennyson
      Maud, pt.1, sect.22, stanza 9, l.902.

  • Nothing grows in ourgarden, only washing. And babies. And where's their fathers live, my love? Over the hills and far away.

    - Dylan Marlais Thomas
      Under MilkWood.

  • Cela est bien dit, re  pondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. 'Well said',Candide replied,'but we must cultivate our own garden.'

    -Voltaire pseudonym of  Fran c° ois Marie Arouet
      Candide, ch.30.

  • 'Tisjust likea summerbirdcageinagarden; thebirdsthat are without despair toget in, and thebirdsthat are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.

    -John Webster
      TheWhite Devil, act1, sc.2.

  • :The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. : It ends with Revelations.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
      LORD ILLINGWORTHMRS ALLONBY1893  AWoman of No Importance, act1.

  • Givea manthesecure possessionof a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease on a garden, and he will convert it into a desert† The magic ofturns sand to gold.

    - Arthur Young
    PROPERTY1787  Journal entries, 30 Jul and 7 Nov, published in Travels in France and Italy (1794).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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