My sunflowers for this year

Photo by Petri Laakso

The sunflower is a favorite emblem of constancy.

- Thomas Bulfinch

I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Every friend is to the other a sun, and a sunflower also. He attracts and follows.

- Jean Paul Richter

It is not while beauty and youth are thine own, and thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear, that the fervor and faith of a soul may be known, to which time will but make thee more dear! Oh the heart that has truly loved never forgets, but as truly loves on to the close, as the sunflower turns to her god when he sets the same look which she turned when he rose!

- Thomas Moore

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do.

- Helen Keller

It is through this weakness that the perfected man, the Sun, is of dual nature, and his evil twin slays him in his glory. So the triumphant Lord of Heaven, the beloved of Apollo and the Muses is brought down into the dust, and who shall mourn him but his Mother Nature, Venus, the lady of love and sorrow? Well is it if she bears within her the Secret of Resurrection! But even Venus owes all her charm to the swift messenger of gods, Mercury, the joyous and ambiguous boy whose tricks first scandalize and then delight Olympus.

- Aleister Crowley