Various folk cultures and traditions assign symbolic meaning to the rose, though these are seldom understood in-depth. Examples of deeper meanings lie within the language of flowers, and how a rose may have a different meaning in arrangements. Examples of common meanings of different coloured roses are: true love (red), mystery (blue), innocence or purity (white), death (black), friendship (yellow), and passion (orange).

In ancient Greece, the rose was closely associated with the goddess Aphrodite. In the Iliad, Aphrodite protects the body of Hector using the "immortal oil of the rose" and the archaic Greek lyric poet Ibycus praises a beautiful youth saying that Aphrodite nursed him "among rose blossoms". The second-century AD Greek travel writer Pausanias associates the rose with the story of Adonis Book Eleven of the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius contains a scene in which the goddess Isis, who is identified with Venus, instructs the main character, Lucius, who has been transformed into a donkey, to eat rose petals from a crown of roses worn by a priest as part of a religious procession in order to regain his humanity.

In the Song of Songs 2:1-2, the Jewish people are compared with a rose, remaining beautiful amongst thorns, although some translations instead refer to a "lily among thorns." The Zohar uses a "thirteen-petalled rose" as a symbol for the thirteen attributes of Divine Mercy named in Exodus 34:6-7. The rose and rosettes were also used to symbolize royalty and Israel, and were used in wreaths for the bridegroom at weddings in Biblical times.

Following the Christianization of the Roman Empire, the rose became identified with the Virgin Mary. The rose symbol eventually led to the creation of the rosary and other devotional prayers in Christianity. Ever since the 1400s, the Franciscans have had a Crown Rosary of the Seven Joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the 1400s and 1500s, the Carthusians promoted the idea of sacred mysteries associated with the rose symbol and rose gardens. Albrecht Dürer's painting The Feast of the Rosary (1506) depicts the Virgin Mary distributing garlands of roses to worshippers. The Rose Cross incorporates the flower directly into the Christian cross, and is the namesake of the esoteric religious order of Rosicrucianism.

The cultivation of geometrical gardens, in which the rose has often held pride of place, has a long history in Iran and surrounding lands. In the lyric ghazal, it is the beauty of the rose that provokes the longing song of the nightingale – an image prominent, for example, in the poems of Hafez.

In turn, the imagery of lover and beloved became a type of the Sufi mystic's quest for divine love, so that Ibn Arabi, for example, aligns the rose with the beloved's blushing cheek on the one hand and, on the other, with the divine names and attributes.

Other well-known examples of rose symbolism in Sufism include:

The rose is the national flower of England, a usage dating back to the English civil wars of the fifteenth century (later called Wars of the Roses), in which a red rose represented the House of Lancaster, and a white rose represented the House of York. The Tudor dynasty created the Tudor rose, which united both the white and the red roses, a symbolism dramatized by Shakespeare in his play Richard III. The traditional ballad "The Rose of England" (Child 166) recounts the seizure of the crown by Earl of Richmond (who became Henry VII of England, the founder of the Tudor dynasty), using the "red rose" as an allegory for Henry.