Quotation Saturday

GARDENS

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.
~James Douglas, Down Shoe Lane

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling.
~Mirabel Osler
 
Science, or para-science, tells us that geraniums bloom better if they are spoken to. But a kind word every now and then is really quite enough. Too much attention, like too much feeding, and weeding and hoeing, inhibits and embarrasses them. 
~Victoria Glendinning

In my garden there is a large place for sentiment. My garden of flowers is also my garden of thoughts and dreams. The thoughts grow as freely as the flowers, and the dreams are as beautiful.
~Abram L. Urban

WEEDS

A weed is but an unloved flower. 
~Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place. 
~Donald Culross Peattie

I learn more about God
From weeds than from roses;
Resilience springing
Through the smallest chink of hope
In the absolute of concrete....
~Phillip Pulfrey
 
You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden. 
~Terri Guillemets

SPRING

Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn.
~Quoted by Lewis Grizzard
 
Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer. 
~Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

Where man sees but withered leaves,
God sees sweet flowers growing.
~Albert Laighton

And Spring arose on the garden fair,
Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Sensitive Plant"

SOUL

The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
~John Greenleaf Whittier, My Psalm

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other. 
~Henry David Thoreau

A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways - by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.
~Plato
 
With all your science - can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?
~Henry David Thoreau

The soul, like the body, lives by what it feeds on. 
~Josiah Gilbert Holland