No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of understanding unless someone explains it to you.

Heaven knows that there are plenty of opportunities in later life, too, for being carried away. What of it? We remain what we are and, no doubt, it is all very good for us!

It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?

When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit you have been generous enough to find in my work.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

Today riches and honours have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth.

You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

I have gone to the forest.

For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot.

I like to take pictures of lots of things: people-such as my nephews, my dogs, and just interesting objects that I see. For instance, I might take a picture of flowers by the side of the road, an old sign or a fence.

The mare set off for home with the speed of a swallow, and going as smoothly and silently. I never had dreamed of such a motion, fluent and graceful, and ambient, soft as the breeze flitting over the flowers, but swift as the summer lightening.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

I'm a hopeless romantic, and very much the person in a relationship to go: If things are going well, I'll buy the flowers, remember the dates of things, plan fun nights out.

Because we are in a war situation, this can sometimes be dangerous work. But guys like A.D. Flowers and his technicians just take it in stride and get on with the job. In four years, we've never had a serious accident or injury working with all the explosions.

The earth laughs in flowers.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

Flowers grow out of dark moments.

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Let a hundred flowers bloom.

I didn't even recall being on the DB sessions until Herbie Flowers reminded me a couple of years ago.

It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet.

I like perfume and flowers.

These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly, waking in the dawn of the morning, in the evening will be a pitiful frivolity, sleeping in the cold night's arms.

For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.

Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

True glory takes root, and even spreads; all false pretences, like flowers, fall to the ground; nor can any counterfeit last long.

At present, I am mainly observing the physical motion of mountains, water, trees and flowers. One is everywhere reminded of similar movements in the human body, of similar impulses of joy and suffering in plants.

When the Christians, upon these occasions, received martyrdom, they were ornamented, and crowned with garlands of flowers; for which they, in heaven, received eternal crowns of glory.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

Little deeds are like little seeds, they grow to flowers or to weeds.

Sweet April showers do spring May flowers.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.