67 Captivating Quotes About Lilies

Lilies have a long and rich history filled with symbolism. Much has been written about this fantastic flower so there are lots of quotes to choose from.

Whether you’re looking for specific quotes about water lilies or lilies of the valley or poetic quotes about lilies and love or something more general, we’ve collected 67 of the most interesting quotes about lilies we could find. Enjoy!

Lilies of the Valley Quotes

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I would far rather have two or three lilies of the valley gathered for me by a person I like, than the most expensive bouquet that could be bought! — Elizabeth Gaskell 

A combination of lily of the valley, cedar, vanilla, and somewhere, the lingering of old rose. These smells are older than any thought. Mama, Teensy, Neecie, and Caro, each one of them had an individual scent, to be sure. But this is the Gumbo of their scents. This is the Gumbo Ya-Ya. This is the internal vial of perfume I carry with me everywhere I go. — Rebecca Wells

The white lily, blooming unseen in the valley,
Does not need to explain itself to anyone;
It lives merely for beauty.
Man, however, cannot accept that ‘merely’. — Mitsuo Aida

This year the violets and lilies of the valley are rampant, while the phlox are about to emit their shocking pink perfume. Oh, my dear, had you been here this spring, you would have seen how the bleeding hearts are thriving. — Madelon Sprengnether

The day we gathered our daughter’s bones, the valley was full of wild lilies. Do you remember? You told me to consider the lilies, that God takes care of them and will surely, then, care for us. Consider them now, my love. Consider the lilies. — Sue Monk Kidd 

Gnats drifted on the same warm summer breeze that saw colorful paper lanterns swaying on their strings. Lily of the valley filled jam jars at each table, but sweet peas had won out in the battle to fragrance the evening air. — Anouska Knight 

Quotes About Water Lilies

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Flattery always slipped off the Prince like water off the leaves of water lilies: it is one of the advantages enjoyed by men who are at once proud and used to being so. — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

And the water lily has always been a water lily for that whole time that it was sprouting out of the wet soil, reaching up through the dark water towards the sunlight, stretching and grasping for the surface; where it then buds and blooms on the outside in the sunshine. It doesn’t bud and bloom on the surface and then try to reach down below into the soil. — C. JoyBell C.

The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. — Daniel Quinn

Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education. — Luther Burbank

Editors can be stupid at times […] I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out. — E.A. Bucchianeri

—And the poet says that by starlight
You come seeking, in the night, the flowers that you picked
And that he has seen on the water, lying in her long veils
White Ophelia floating, like a great lily. — Arthur Rimbaud 

When I’m working in the barn or house, I often think of all the errors I’ve made in my life. But then I quickly put that behind me and think of water lilies. They will always eradicate unpleasant thoughts. — Tasha Tudor

I have shaken loose. Like the lily, I rest on the deep water’s surface. Not knowing the journey’s end, I rest in nature’s embrace. — Patricia Robin Woodruff

Creating yourself is a source of great pride, but it also leads to a feeling of having no foundations. I’ve known many gifted children of immigrants who have a sense of being lilies growing in a swamp—beautiful flowers but no deep roots. — Irvin D. Yalom

The night folded around them with a sweetness and poignancy heightened by the new pale stars that prickled silver fire in the water of the lily ponds, by the scented winds, and by the nearness of each other. — Pauline Gedge 

A pure drop of rain may fall on a beautiful water lily or on a dirty mud pond! This is exactly what happens when we are born! — Mehmet Murat ildan

A lily earns its beauty in ugly waters. — Matshona Dhliwayo

This morning the water lilies are no less lovely, I think,
than the lilies of Monet.
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead children out of the fields into the text
of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better than the grass.
— Mary Oliver 

Tired of motion, of the rhythms of motion,
Tired of the sweet play of our interwoven strength,
We lie in each other’s arms and let the palps
Of waterlily leaf and petal hold back
All motion in the heat thickened, drowsing air. — Kenneth Rexroth

At sunrise, the river’s flowers are red like fire,
In spring, the river’s water’s green as lilies.
How could I not remember south of the river?
— Bai Juyi

(Watching her) was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. — Lois McMaster Bujold 

Only the poet or the saint can water an asphalt pavement in the confident anticipation that lilies will reward his labour. — W. Somerset Maugham 

Quotes About Lilies and Love

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A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. — Carson McCullers

My heart burst with a thousand beautiful blooms, all tiger lilies. And I knew with a certainty more powerful than anything I’d ever felt before that we belonged together. — Colleen Houck

I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I’m just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep. — Leonard Cohen

Life with you was lovely—and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink ‘v’ in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering ‘l.’ Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. — Vladimir Nabokov

Dizzy love turned a star lily pink,
And hung above our lids too flushed to blink,
But icy blue froze the fairytale cold,
Though I treasured you and you sparkled with someone to hold. — Owl City

Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. — Cathy Ostlere 

He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water—although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul. — Cornelia Funke 

I lost myself. Forgot myself.
I lay my face against the Beloved’s face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind,
Abandoning my cares
Among the lilies, forgotten. — Juan de la Cruz

You give me an apartment full of morning smells- toasted bagel and black coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill. You give me 24-across. — Rebecca Lindenberg

My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. — Oscar Wilde 

Quotes About Lilies

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Now everything is white, like Venus, like tears upon lilies, like remembering a dream within another. — Eirene Evripidou

Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. — Tom Stoppard 

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance. — John Steinbeck

The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’
And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’
The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’
And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’ — Alfred Tennyson

Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls. — Sylvia Plath

When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. […] What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. — Barbara Brown Taylor

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed, and all that surrounded me was a darkened room. — Alice Hoffman

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. — Oscar Wilde

Man breaks and destroys; man lays waste; man kills; but the summer remains summer; the lily remains the lily; and the star remains the star. — Victor Hugo

The goal is here, now; the goal is not somewhere else. In fact, you are the goal. In fact there is no other fulfillment than that of this moment—consider the lilies. — Osho

The people who influence us most are not those who buttonhole us and talk to us, but those who live their lives like the stars in heaven and the lilies in the field, perfectly simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mold. — Oswald Chambers

The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died. — Katharine Hepburn

I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies. — Francesca Lia Block

A desert lily need not turn jealous eyes toward the common violet. — Colleen Houck

We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. — Susan Griffin

If they call you the enemy, a liar and a narcissist. Plant those very flowers: anemone, lily and narcissus. Use their crap to cultivate your mind. — Kamand Kojouri

Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks. — Anne Sexton 

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
— John Keats

The first sorrow of autumn is the slow good-bye of the garden that stands so long in the evening—a brown poppy head, the stalk of a lily, and still cannot go. — Ted Hughes

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
— Oscar Wilde

We think magnificence is in short supply, that dust and dirt choke out the lilies. But that’s not true and never was. Lilies may root in dirt, but they reach for heaven—and in the reaching, reveal their magnificence. — Philip Gulley

Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. — Amor Towles

We sow the seed of deadly nightshade and wish it to bear lilies and roses! — Gottfried von Straßburg

Consider the lilies of the field. Look at the fuzz on a baby’s ear. Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. Learn to be happy. And think of life as a terminal illness because if you do you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived. — Anna Quindlen

We want the azalea, the poinsettia, the calla lily. We pluck them from our gradens and plant them in our homes and we don’t seem to remember their toxic nature. — Tahereh Mafi

Let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity. — Francis de Sales

Which quotes about lilies has inspired you the most? If you have any favorite lily of the valley quotes or quotes about water lilies, type them in the comment section below. Don’t forget to share any quotes about lilies and love too!

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