Irises Quotes

• What in your life is calling you, When all the noise is silenced, The meetings adjourned... The lists laid aside, And the Wild Iris blooms By itself In the dark forest... What still pulls on your soul?

  Rumi

  Life, Dark, Soul

  60 Copy quote

• In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
  In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Change, Spring, Flower

  "Locksley Hall" l. 20 (1842)

  71 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

  Margaret Atwood

  Beautiful, Cat, Heart

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• I have had more than half a century of such happiness. A great deal of worry and sorrow, too, but never a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris, a lark, a bluebird, or a dewy morning glory.

  Mary McLeod Bethune

  Nature, Morning, Purple

  27 Copy quote

• This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Children, Eye

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2016). “Flappers and Philosophers: American Literature”, VM eBooks

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Iris, if you were a melody...piano melody. I used only the good notes.

  Jack Black

  Music, Piano, Used

  7 Copy quote

• Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

  Diane Ackerman

  Nature, Self, Bud

  Diane Ackerman (2002). “Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden”, G K Hall & Company

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Cat, Eye, Dust

  Charles Baudelaire (1991). “The Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen: Poems”, Boa Editions

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Flower, Garden, Expression

  Neale Donald Walsch (2002). “Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue”, p.212, Penguin

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Swimming, Dark, Men

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1951). “Speak, Memory: A Memoir”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The grass he walked through was new and a sweet smell clung to his clothes. There was blue dye on his hands from the wild irises... that the color of the sky was a shade that could never be replicated in any photograph, just as Heaven could never be seen from the confines of Earth.

  Alice Hoffman

  Sweet, Blue, Hands

  14 Copy quote

• Iris from sea brings wind or mighty rain.

  Empedocles

  Rain, Science, Wind

  28 Copy quote

• There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners and non-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the high defiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos and tornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises. It sounds very well to garden a 'natural way'. You may see the natural way in any desert, any swamp, any leech-filled laurel hell. Defiance, on the other hand, is what makes gardeners.

  Henry Mitchell

  Nature, Pride, Garden

  Henry Mitchell (2003). “The Essential Earthman: Henry Mitchell on Gardening”, p.3, Indiana University Press

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

  Mary Oliver

  Weed, Voice, Blue

  Mary Oliver (2006). “Thirst: Poems”, p.46, Beacon Press

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• Donde termina el arco iris, en tu alma o en el horizonte? Where does the rainbow end, in your soul or on the horizon?

  Pablo Neruda

  Rainbow, Soul, Doe

  10 Copy quote

• The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

  Herbert Spencer

  Light, White, Poetry

  Herbert Spencer (1871). “Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic”, p.31

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The world has different owners at sunrise... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Wall, Cat, Animal

  19 Copy quote

• There's smoke in my iris, but I painted a sunny day on the insides of my eyelids

  Aesop Rock

  Sunny Day, Eyelids, Smoke

  Song: Battery, Album: Labor Days, 2001

  100 Copy quote

  Show source

• It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

  Mary Oliver

  Weed, Blue, Voice

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can see the weakness of a man right through his iris.

  RZA

  Rap, Men, Hip Hop

  "Song: "4th Chamber" (Album: "Liquid Swords")". 1995.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone Of costliest emblem: other creature here Beast, bird, insect, or worm durst enter none; Such was their awe of man.

  John Milton

  Men, Rose, Bird

  1665 Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.4, l.698-705.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or to defer it. You have your own life to live, Iris, and at its end, the only opinion that amounts to anything is that which God bestows

  Gregory Maguire

  People, Might, Action

  11 Copy quote

• Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

  Margaret Atwood

  Clamor, Handmaids Tale, Bleeding Heart

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Constancy will always be the genius of love, the indication of that strength which constitutes the poet. A man should possess all women in his wife, like those squalid poetasters of the seventeenth century who made fair Irises and dazzling Chloes of their lowly Manons.

  Honore de Balzac

  Men, Wife, Chloe

  11 Copy quote

• In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.

  Barbara Hurd

  Letting Go, Dream, Home

  Barbara Hurd (2003). “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination”, p.43, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  12 Copy quote

  Show source