the gardener QUOTES

1 " A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry. "

― Michael Pollan , Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

2 " Professionals and good Samaritans, once be the gardener of the nation, would root up corruption. "

― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma , You By You

3 " Be the gardener of gratitude to grow flowers of happiness in your garden. "

― Debasish Mridha

4 " Be the gardener of love and joy,
Happiness will bloom in your garden. "

― Debasish Mridha

5 " As a woman, I see myself as a garden, and I see myself as the gardener of myself, I see myself forming and pruning and watering and nourishing all the flowers and trees and vines and leaves in me. There is a world within yourself, that has so much to offer! If only you would walk into it each day! We were not meant to save the world; we were meant to save ourselves! And in saving ourselves, we have saved worlds innumerable. "

― C. JoyBell C.

6 " At last the gardener arrived, mumbling something about rascals and country bumpkins, and took me out into the park, giving me a lengthy lecture as he did so. I was instructed to be sober and industrious, and not to wander about aimlessly or waste my time in unproductive activities: if I heeded this counsel, he said, I might in time achieve something. He gave me much other useful and well-phrased advice too, but I have since forgotten almost all of it. "

― Joseph von Eichendorff , Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts

7 " I often said that writers are of two types.

There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.

And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.

No one is purely an architect or a gardener in terms of a writer, but many writers tend to one side or the other. I'm very much more a gardener. "

― George R.R. Martin

8 " We all wear masksto veil the truth.Truth is nakedness.Truth is fear.Truth is the gardener making you sit on his lapasking you tolight his cigarette.Truth is father— with a limp cigarette on his lips —telling you to never use his matches to light it for him.Truth is father yelling:" It is not nice for little girls to do so”.Truth is a curious girlwanting to ignite a matchlike a woman.Truth is the maid watching from the kitchen,knowing.But knowing isn’t truth.Truth is the maid calling:Come. Come.Truth is the gardener understanding. But understanding isn’t truth.Truth is the maid saying," Stay away!" Truth is a girl thinking she is in control.That nothing happened, nothing bad.But the truest truthis a girl knowing, a girl understanding thaton that daysomeone stole a little piece of her truth. "

9 " What was missing, I've come to believe, were the two postures that are most characteristically biblical -- the two postures that have been least explored by Christians in the last century. They are found at the very beginning of the human story, according to Genesis: like our first parents, we are to be creators and cultivators. Or to put it more poetically, we are artists and gardeners. ... after the contemplation, the artist and the gardener both adopt a posture of purposeful work. They bring their creativity and effort to their calling. ... They are acting in the image of One who spoke a world into being and stooped down to form creatures from the dust. They are creaturely creators, tending and shaping the world that original Creator made. "

― Andy Crouch , Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

10 " The iron has entered my soul,' announced George Knox impressively. 'Let me tell you, my dear Laura, that when I lay here weak and ill, unable to raise a hand in my own defence, I begged for a nurse, a hireling who would do her day-labour as a machine, and not worry a sick, ageing man.
But even this was denied. Miss Grey, all kindness and sympathy and, I must say, Laura, an infernal bore, insisted on nursing me herself. Degrading enough in any case but the worst you have not heard. Could I ask my secretary to shave me? No.
As a matter of fact, I did, but she wouldn't, or couldn't. Imagine me, Laura, becoming more like a pard day by day prickly and revolting to myself, mortified beyond words to be seen in this this condition, but helpless.'
'Why didn't you get the gardener to do it? Or use a safety razor?'

'My dear Laura,' said George Knox in a hurt voice, 'you do not seem to realise how weak I was, how very weak. For two days my temperature had been over a hundred, and when the fever had left me I lay powerless, as a new-born babe, and the woman triumphed over me. She would not let me shave, she fed me on slops, she would not even give me clean pyjamas till the third day. "

― Angela Thirkell , High Rising (Barsetshire, #1)

11 " Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime. "

― Ray Bradbury , Fahrenheit 451

12 " It is so true, that the Socialists look upon mankind as a subject for social experiments, that if, by chance, they are not quite certain of the success of these experiments, they will request a portion of mankind, as a subject to experiment upon. It is well known how popular the ideaof trying all systems is, and one of their chiefs has been known seriously to demand of the Constituent Assembly a parish, with all its inhabitants, upon which to make his experiments. It is thus that an inventor will make a small machine before he makes one of the regular size. Thus the chemist sacrifices some substances, the agriculturist some seed and corner of his field, to make trial of an idea. But think of the difference between the gardener and his trees, between the inventor and his machine, between the chemist and his substances, between the agriculturist and his seed! The Socialist thinks, in all sincerity, that there is the same difference between himself and mankind. No wonder the politicians of the nineteenth century look upon society as an artifical production of the legislator's genius. This idea, the result of a classical education, has taken possession of all the thinkers and great writers of our country. To all these persons, the relations between mankind and the legislator appear to be the same as those that exist between the clay and the potter. "

― Frédéric Bastiat , The Law

13 " He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. "