Flowers are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.
– Luther Burbank, botanist, horticulturist

Flowers have been an important part of cultures for thousands of years.
People use them to celebrate, mourn, mark special occasions, and
adorn themselves.

When you have only two pennies left in the world,
buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.
~ Chinese Proverb

An Afghan version of “beating swords into plowshares …”
This man in Kayan, Baghlan Province, was
making flowerpots from shells intended to kill and maim.

Flowers have an expression of countenance as much as men or animals.
Some seem to smile; some have a sad expression;
some are pensive and diffident;
others again are plain, honest and upright, like the
broad-faced sunflower and the hollyhock.
– Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers: A Discourse of Flowers

CAMBODIA-10083 — Oaxaca, MexicoAngkor Wat, Cambodia

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
~ Claude Monet

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him
through the graceful bending of their stems and the
harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms.
Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.
– Auguste Rodin

Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks.
There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret,
like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
~G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

People from a planet without flowers would think
we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
~Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat