Daisies

Daisy (Bellis perennis) are the most prevalent flowers in the Asteraceae or Compositae family, the largest family of vascular plants, which is also referred to as the aster, daisy, or sunflower family.

There is a flower, a little flower
With silver crest and golden eye,
That welcomes every changing hour,
And weathers every sky.

Bellis perennis (Johann Georg Sturm)

Quotes

• Kathleen Kelly: They're so friendly. Don't you think daisies are the friendliest flower?
  • Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, You've Got Mail (1998).

• Not worlds on worlds, in phalanx deep,
  Need we to prove a God is here;
  The Daisy, fresh from Winter's sleep,
  Tells of his hand in lines as clear.
  • John Mason Good, "The Daisy" (c1813), in Olinthus Gregory, Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Character, Literary, Professional, and Religious, of the Late John Mason Good, M.D. (London: Henry Fisher, Son, and Co., 1828), p. 381.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 155-56.

• And a breastplate made of daisies,
  Closely fitting, leaf on leaf,
  Periwinkles interlaced
  Drawn for belt about the waist;
  While the brown bees, humming praises,
  Shot their arrows round the chief.
  • Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hector in the Garden.

• The daisy's for simplicity and unaffected air.
  • Robert Burns, O Luve Will Venture In.

• Even thou who mournst the daisy's fate,
  That fate is thine—no distant date;
  Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate,
  Full on thy bloom,
  Till crushed beneath the furrow's weight
  Shall be thy doom!
  • Robert Burns, To a Mountain Daisy.

• Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
  I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,
  A host in the sunshine, an army in June,
  The people God sends us to set our heart free.
  • Bliss Carman, Daisies.

• You may wear your virtues as a crown,
  As you walk through life serenely,
  And grace your simple rustic gown
  With a beauty more than queenly.
  Though only one for you shall care,
  One only speak your praises;
  And you never wear in your shining hair,
  A richer flower than daisies.
  • Phoebe Cary, The Fortune in the Daisy.

• Yun daiseyd mantels ys the mountayne dyghte.
  • Thomas Chatterton, Rowley Poems, Ælla.

• That of all the floures in the mede,
  Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,
  Suche as men callen daysyes in her toune.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women, line 41.

• That men by reason will it calle may
  The daisie or elles the eye of day
  The emperice, and floure of floures alle.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Legend of Good Women, line 184.

• Daisies infinite
  Uplift in praise their little glowing hands,
  O'er every hill that under heaven expands.
  • Ebenezer Elliott, Miscellaneous Poems, Spring, line 13.

• And daisy-stars, whose firmament is green.
  • Thomas Hood, Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, 36.

• Stoop where thou wilt, thy careless hand
  Some random bud will meet;
  Thou canst not tread, but thou wilt find
  The daisy at thy feet.
  • Thomas Hood, Song.

• All summer she scattered the daisy leaves;
  They only mocked her as they fell.
  She said: "The daisy but deceives;
  'He loves me not,' 'he loves me well,'
  One story no two daisies tell."
  Ah foolish heart, which waits and grieves
  Under the daisy's mocking spell.
  • Helen Hunt Jackson, The Sign of the Daisy.

• Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
  One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
  When he call'd the flowers, so blue and golden,
  Stars that on earth's firmament do shine.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Flowers.

• Stars are the daisies that begem
  The blue fields of the sky.
  • David Macbeth Moir, Dublin University Magazine (Oct., 1852).

• There is a flower, a little flower
  With silver crest and golden eye,
  That welcomes every changing hour,
  And weathers every sky.
  • James Montgomery, A Field Flower.

• The Rose has but a Summer reign,
  The daisy never dies.
  • James Montgomery, The Daisy, On Finding One in Bloom on Christmas Day.

• Bright flowers, whose home is everywhere
  Bold in maternal nature's care
  And all the long year through the heir
  Of joy and sorrow,
  Methinks that there abides in thee
  Some concord with humanity,
  Given to no other flower I see
  The forest through.
  • William Wordsworth, To the Daisy.

• The poet's darling.
  • William Wordsworth, To the Daisy.

• We meet thee, like a pleasant thought,
  When such are wanted.
  • William Wordsworth, To the Daisy.

• Thou unassuming Commonplace
  Of Nature.
  • William Wordsworth, To the Same Flower.