Garden Quotes - page 35
Something which can help a person who is depressed is work, interest in life. The garden, plants, flowers, trees, the countryside, a walk in the open air - all these things tear a person away from a state of inactivity and awake other interests. They act like medicines. To occupy oneself with the arts, with music and so on, is very beneficial. The thing that I place top of the list, however, is interest in the Church, in reading Holy Scripture and attending services. As you study the words of God you are cured without being aware of it.... in our Church a cure is to be found through love for God and prayer, provided this is done with all the heart.
Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia
Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The essence of Christianity is told to us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the Tree of Knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.
Frank Zappa
About this time [c. 1812] Turner removed to Twickenham, where he purchased Sandycomb Lodge, near Richmond Bridge [London]. It was an unpretending little place, and the rooms were small. There were several models of ships in glass cases, to which Turner had painted a sea and background. They much resembled the large vessels in his sea pieces. Richmond scenery greatly influenced his style. The Scotch firs (or stone-pine) around are in most of his large classical subjects, and Richmond landscape is decidedly the basis of 'The Rise of Carthage'. Here he had a long strip of land, planted by him so thickly with willows that his father, who delighted in the garden, complained that it was a mere osier-bed. Turner used to refresh his eye with the run of the boughs from his sitting-room window.
J. M. W. Turner
"Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as "the information highway”) is, as a friend of mine has it, "like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalog of bootlegs. "But it's from Japan!” She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.
William Gibson
Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.
Hermann Hesse
"There's no video of president Trump sucking a ding dong. And so what if there was, that's a lot better than World War III Owen. I never sucked any ding dongs, but I'll tell ya if they were going to black mail me to start World War III about one, I'd say hey, I sucked a ball golf ball through a frickin garden hose!
Alex Jones
...Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine's Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded on his stren gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic "on the Nature of Things", follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise. Almost contemporary with Caesar and Pompey, he lived in the midst of turmoil and alarms; his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquility and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there no hell, except here, and there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.
Will Durant
The cookery programmes that everybody watches are ridiculous, and so are the house programmes. You know you do not need a fish tank in the atrium you haven't got. And people now, feel under pressure to perform in their lives. Who has the time though? Who really has the time to skin the baby rabbit and dip it in the duck's tears and nail it to the garden roof and get to work with the blow torch so it has just the right texture to match the squash you made that morning using just your elbows. Who has the time? Nobody lives like this! We go around thinking that everybody else does, you know? Because what happens is you come in from work, and you think... maybe at most, if you're getting very adventurous, you will think "TONIGHT, we will eat something that has two colours in it!" BUT YOU DON'T! You end up sitting in front of the television, watching these programmes, eating bread from the bag, dipping it in anything runnier than bread, because there's isn't time for this horse shit!
Dylan Moran
You see, most modern technology doesn't work. It's supposed to free you, but it's a terrible trap, of course. Mobile phones for example: everybody has one now. I have one and they're awful. They've completely ruined, I mean, people ring you up and say "Hi, it's me, I'm in the bath!" and you go "Well, you're still an asshole, I hope you drown and hello." And they've completely dispensed with the whole drama of news, the simple idea of having something to relate, you know. When you could bound in from the garden and pick up the old Bakelite phone that weighted seven pounds and say "MIRIAM'S DEAD”. You can't do that anymore. You're probably there! [pantomiming being on phone] "Yes, her head's rolling back, spit's coming out, her eyes are going everywhere, here, I'll take a picture -click- you see what I mean? Sheeee's fucked!"
Dylan Moran
I'm just a lonesome traveler, The Great Historical Bum.
Highly educated from history I have come.
I built the Rock of Ages, 'twas in the Year of One
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.
I worked in the Garden of Eden, that was the year of two,
Joined the apple pickers union, I always paid my due;
I'm the man that signed the contract to raise the rising sun,
And that was about the biggest thing that man had ever done.
Woody Guthrie
"Harold, if you'll excuse me-" "But whatever can you be doing, my child?" The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike- I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it- I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord, I just don't know.
Stephen King
Night hung its blue over the garden. Satan fell asleep. He had a dream, and in that dream, soaring over the earth, he saw it covered with angels in revolt, beautiful as gods whose eyes darted lightning. And from pole to pole one single cry, formed of a myriad cries, mounted towards him, filled with hope and love. And Satan said:
"Let us go forth! Let us seek the ancient adversary in his high abode." And he led the countless host of angels over the celestial plains. And Satan was cognizant of what took place in the heavenly citadel. When news of this second revolt came thither, the Father said to the Son:
"The irreconcilable foe is rising once again. Let us take heed to ourselves, and in this, our time of danger, look to our defences, lest we lose our high abode."
And the Son, consubstantial with the Father, replied:
"We shall triumph under the sign that gave Constantine the victory."
Anatole France
What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about.
First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother's foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!
Grace Paley
I was lying in an easy-chair, in front of a garden. I saw that the spiritual power was still active in me: I could go on with occult experiments in spite of the illness. I used to concentrate on things and persons and circumstances and wanted to see if the power worked. It worked very well on the mental and vital planes. Then I broadened the field of activity. I could go on doing my work in various parts of France and America and other places. I could clearly see the faces of the persons worked upon. They could be made to do what they by themselves could not. These were controlled experiments ... I could see that nothing could stop the work: even without my body the work could go on ... Wherever the call was, I could attend.
Mirra Alfassa
Does anybody now believe in the story of the serpent? I pity any man or woman who, in this nineteenth century, believes in that childish fable. Why did Adam and Eve disobey? Why, they were tempted. By whom? The devil. Who made the devil? God. What did God make him for? Why did he not tell Adam and Eve about this serpent? Why did he not watch the devil, instead of watching Adam and Eve? Instead of turning them out, why did he not keep him from getting in? Why did he not have his flood first, and drown the devil, before he made a man and woman. And yet, people who call themselves intelligent-professors in colleges and presidents of venerable institutions-teach children and young men that the Garden of Eden story is an absolute historical fact. I defy any man to think of a more childish thing. This God, waiting around Eden-knowing all the while what would happen-having made them on purpose so that it would happen, then does what? Holds all of us responsible, and we were not there.
Robert G. Ingersoll
