The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.
My interest is in completing an image that is spectacular beyond belief. My fidelity is to the image and the art and not to the bragging rights of making every stroke on every flower. I'm realistic.
A young bride is like a plucked flower; but a guilty wife is like a flower that had been walked over.
Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.
Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.
Balenciaga taught me everything I know. He taught me to care for the details, that it was not necessary to sew on a button where it had no use or to add a flower to make a dress beautiful... no unnecessary detail.
Very often, people are obsessed with what others think of them. It's like if a flower wants to be a cactus or a palm but it's not. A flower is a flower, and that's enough. That's all you have to do is be a flower.
Old white guys can be a funny bunch, can't they? The same anti-same-sex marriage, anti-affirmative action cadre can flower into the biggest supporters of 'equality' the minute they get a whiff of minority empowerment.
All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.
I'm a Capricorn, and they flower late.
The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.
The very best hotel I've stayed in is the Intercontinental on Park Lane. We went there for the Chelsea Flower Show a few years ago, and it was sheer luxury. Everybody had a smile on their face. I came home and changed all my pillows because the hotel ones were so beautiful.
The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.
I spent my childhood clad in 1970s hand-me-downs, primarily from male cousins, which mainly consisted of a selection of beige, brown and orange dungarees. That, combined with a perfectly round pudding-bowl haircut, made me look, on a good day, like a cross between Ann Widdecombe, one of the Flower Pot Men, and a monk.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.
For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.
Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also - if you love them enough.
When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.
