I have a strong antipathy to
everything connected with gardens, gardening and
gardeners. ... Gardening seems to me a kind of admission of defeat. ... Man
was made for better things than pruning his rose trees. The state of mind of
the confirmed gardener seems to me as reprehensible as that of the confirmed
alcoholic. Both have capitulated to the world.
Both have become lotus eaters and drifters.
- Colin Wilson, A Book of Gardens, 1963
When confronted with two evils, a man
will always choose the most attractive.
- Anonymous
The garden is like a spoiled beauty.
There is no limit to its demands
for admiration. It is new not only each spring, but each month, almost
each day of the year. You may be required to find something fresh to
say about it at least twenty-five times in one season, something which
usually turns out to be grossly ignorant and unsatisfactory.
- Scribner's Magazine (July 1915)
The older one grows, the more one
likes indecency.
- Virginia Woolf
Show me a person without any
prejudice of any kind
on any subject and I'll show you someone who may be admirably
virtuous but is surely no gardener.
- Allen Lacy
We so love all new and unusual things
that we even derive a secret pleasure
from the saddest and most tragic events, both because of their novelty and
because of the natural malignity that exists within us.
- Maxims of Madame de Sable
We are perverse creatures and never
satisfied.
- Nan Fairbrother
Bear in mind that the children of
life are the children of joy; that the
lower animals are only unhappy when made so by man; that man alone
of all the creatures, has "found out many inventions", the chief of which
appears to be the art of making himself miserable, and of seeing all
Nature stained with that dark and hateful colour.
- W.H.Hudson (1841-1922)
Religion is an insult to human dignity.
With or without it, you'd have good people doing
good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things,
it takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg
Calm in quietude is not real calm;
when you can be calm in the midst of activity,
this is the true state of nature.
Happiness in comfort is not real happiness;
when you can be happy in the midst of hardship,
then you see the true potential of the mind.
- Huanchu Daoren
The fair-weather gardener, who will do nothing except
when
wind and weather and everytning else are favourable,
is never a master of his
craft.
- Canon Ellacombe
A garden is a symbol of man's
arrogance, perverting nature to human ends ...
- Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligan
.... and humans are part of nature ... a perverse dilemma!
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes Arranged by Over 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse,
exterminating the enemies ... despising age, denying human
natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of
the aging
preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of
private nightmares
of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery
create
ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.
- Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1982
Of the seven deadly sins, surely it
is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.
- Michael Pollan
why do you suppose
that every understanding
prior to a real understanding
feels like something
to impose on others?
- Benjamin Dean, Coffee Stains
The only thing we have to fear on
this planet is man.
Carl Jung
When bad things happen, it's the time
when you get to work
in the garden and sort out the pots from the weeds.
- Elizabeth Hurley
When one speaks of humanity,
the idea is fundamental that this is
something which separates and distinguishes man from nature. In
reality, however, there is no such separation: "natural" qualities
and
those called truly "human" are inseparably grown together. Man,
in
his highest and noblest capacities, is wholly nature and embodies
its uncanny dual character. Those of his abilities which are
terrifying
and considered inhuman may even be the fertile soil out of which
alone all humanity can grow in impulse, deed, and work.
- Frederick Nietzsche, Homer's
Contest
A garden was the primitive prison,
till man,
with Promethean felicity and boldness,
luckily sinned himself out of it.
- Charles Lamb
I believe in getting into hot water;
it keeps you clean.
- G. K. Chesterton
I have discovered that all human evil
comes from this,
man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
Moderation is a fatal thing.
Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Oscar Wilde
A garden is quite comfortable with immorality
and evil.
Gardeners at War with Mother Nature.
Even the Devil wants a grand landscape garden near his comfortable castle.
Goodness casts a dark shadow.
I once read about the dangers of gardening, so I quit reading for two weeks.
Beauty is the Mistress, the Gardener Her slave.
Gardeners had better be ready to see the ugly, the deformed,
the grotesque, the dying
and the dead.
Gardeners are divided into those
that think others are doing it wrong.
- Mike Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
The trouble with resisting temptation
is it may never come your way again.
Korman's Law
A garden is like those pernicious machineries
which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand,
and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Democracy is fine in politics.
It should stay there, and we need more of it.
But its political virture is no reason to practice it in the garden.
- Allen Lacy
Marco Polo tells the tale of The Old Man in the
Mountains
and how he recruits new members to his Band of Assassins
by means of drugs, beautiful women, lush gardens, and
religious promises.
Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book
not only
suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a
season passes away
unimproved.
- George Washington
Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any
sense divine
and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening
conquerer and tyrant.
- Aldous Huxley
The unfortunate thing about this
world is that the good habits
are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
- W. Somerset Maugham
It takes a while to
grasp that not all failures are self-imposed,
the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes
a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for
character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong?
Maybe nothing.
- Eleanor Perényi
Nam curiosus nemo est, quin sit malevolus.
For nobody is curious, who isn't malevolent.
- Plautus
Life . . . is an onion. One
peels it while crying.
- Author Unknown
I can say with conviction that the struggle
which evil necessitates is one of the greatest
blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the
soul
of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full
also of the
overcomings of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a
glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate
with
the good, that it may prevail.
- Helen Keller
The good thing about bad things is
that they end.
The bad things about good things is that they also end.
Nature is what she is - amoral
and persistent.
- Stephen Jay Gould
"I have no more than twenty
acres of ground," he replied,
"the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my
children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great
evils - boredom, vice, and want."
- Voltaire
Self is the root, the tree, and the
branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
- William Law
Whenever I'm caught between two
evils, I take the one I've never tried.
- Mae West
Nothing will be left. Nothing in the air, nothing
under the earth,
nothing in the waters. All will be exterminated.
- Leonardo Da Vinci
Botany is a sequel of murder and a chronicle of the dead.
- Julian
Hawthorne
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the
Soul
Simplicity and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions: The Maxims of Gardening
By Michael P. Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links
and Bibliography
Cliches for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Short Poems and Haiku by Michael P. Garofalo
Awards and Recognition for this Web Site
The Mental and Spiritual Aspects of
Gardening:
Bibliography and Resources
Quotes for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Cliches, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Recommended Reading
Evil
The Decadent Gardener. By Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. Edited by Alex Martin and Jerome Fletcher with engravings and drawings by Francois Houtin. Dedalus, Ltd., 1996. 252 pages. The dark, evil, intoxicated, gothic, fanciful, bizarre, and twisted side of gardens and gardening lore.
Gothic Gardening Something Wicked This Way Grows. mAlice's gardening notes are Wonderful!!
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
I Welcome Your Comments, Ideas,
Contributions, and Suggestions
E-mail Mike Garofalo in Red Bluff, California
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Evil - Quotes for Gardeners, Version 4.7
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong