Won’t you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.
RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN
I don’t know whether nice people tend to grow roses or growing roses makes people nice.
ROLAND A. BROWNE Author of The Rose Lover’s Guide in 1974, was once misspelt as Roland A. Beowne.
Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration.
LOU ERICKSON
Of all the wonderful things in the wonderful universe of God, nothing seems to me more surprising than the planting of a seed in the blank earth and the result thereof.
CELIA THAXTER
The garden is so ferociously sexy at night, it’s almost lurid.
ANNE RAVER
Garden writing is often very tame, a real waste when you think how opinionated, inquisitive, irreverent and lascivious gardeners themselves tend to be. Nobody talks much about the muscular limbs, dark, swollen buds, strip-tease trees and unholy beauty that have made us all slaves of the Goddess Flora.
KETZEL LEVINE
Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
CICERO
To the makying of bookes of gardenyng there is noe ende.
THOMAS HYLL FROM The Profitable Arte of Gardening in 1563, the first gardening book published in English. If only he’d realised what he’d started …
Gardening is an active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.
THOMAS BERRY
Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.
HENRY MITCHELL
In successive censuses gardeners are continuously found at the head of the tables of longevity.
WILLIAM BEACH THOMAS
A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
MAY SARTON
A man should never plant a garden larger than his wife can take care of.
T. H. EVERETT
My green thumb only came as a result of mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view.
H. FRED ALE
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
ALFRED AUSTIN Appointed Poet Laureate after Tennyson died and William Morris had turned the post down. The fact that he was a prominent Tory journalist and leader writer for the Standard probably got him the job: his rather dull poetry is barely read at all now.
A garden without a fence is like a dog without a tail.
MOROCCAN PROVERB
Botany is a sequel of murder and a chronicle of the dead.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE
Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!
ROBERT SCHUMANN
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Since the death of Einstein in 1955, there hasn’t been a single living genius. From Michelangelo, through Shakespeare, Newton, Beethoven, Darwin, Freud and Einstein, there’s always been a living genius. Now, for the first time in 500 years, we are on our own.
J. G. BALLARD
A genius is someone who has two great ideas.
JACOB BRONOWSKI
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. A real genius has his original ideas closer together.
G. C. LICHTENBERG Germany’s first professor of physics who had laid the theoretical groundwork for the Xerox machine by the mid-eighteenth century. Severely hunchbacked, he nevertheless became one of the great aphorists of the age, recording his thoughts and observations in a series of alphabetical ‘waste books’ (he’d reached volume ‘L’ by the time he died in 1799).
With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads for us.
PAUL ELDRIDGE
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Genius is childhood recovered at will.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The first and last thing required of genius is the love of truth.
GOETHE
What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.
EUGÈNE DELACROIX
The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions – which time and mediocrity can solve.
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.
ARISTOTLE
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence, nor imagination, nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love: that is the soul of genius.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Brain researchers estimate that your unconscious database outweighs the conscious on an order exceeding ten million to one. This database is the source of your hidden, natural genius. In other words, a part of you is much smarter than you are. The wise people regularly consult that smarter part.
MICHAEL J. GELB
Nothing has been more difficult than to be curious about an object or a person, without being obstructed by preconceived ideas. Occasionally the veil is lifted, and the one who lifts it is called a genius.
THEODORE ZELDIN
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Genius and stupidity never stray from their paths: talent wanders after every light.
GEORGE MOORE
Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.
JOE THEISMANN
Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
HENRI POINCARÈ
A line is a dot that went for a walk.
PAUL KLEE
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
ERIC TEMPLE BELL
At the age of 11, I began Euclid, with my brother as my tutor. This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
We should give as we would receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers.
SENECA
Blessed are those who can give without remembering, and take without forgetting.
PRINCESS ELIZABETH BIBESCO
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.
2 CORINTHIANS 9:7
The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. He also accepteth from a grouch.
CATHERINE HALL
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life – happiness, freedom, and peace of mind – are always attained by giving them to someone else.
PEYTON CONWAY MARCH US Army Chief of Staff during World War I. His father Francis Andrew March was an Anglo-Saxon scholar and the first American to work on the Oxford English Dictionary.
No one has ever become poor by giving.
ANNE FRANK
You have not lived until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.
JOHN BUNYAN
A gaseous vertebrate.
ERNEST HAECKEL German biologist, free thinker and illustrator whose drawings of the human embryo created the now discredited idea that humans pass through the history of evolution, from fish to mammals, in the womb. He coined the words ‘phylum’ and ‘ecology’ and was the first person recorded using the term ‘First World War’, as early as 1914.
God has no religion.
MAHATMA GANDHI
You must believe in God, despite what the clergy tell you.
BENJAMIN JOWETT
I believe in God. If you were me, and had my life, you would believe in God too.
MICHAEL CAINE Interview with Gyles Brandreth in the Sunday Times (23 December 2001). Caine’s charlady mother was descended from Roma gypsies and his father was a fish-market porter. Born Maurice Micklewhite, he chose his stage name in 1954 while standing in a phone booth in Leicester Square when The Caine Mutiny was being shown at the Odeon.
In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.
ISAAC NEWTON
I think it is a sign of human weakness to try to find out the shape and form of God.
PLINY THE ELDER
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
WOODY ALLEN
When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, ‘Why God? Why me?’ and the thundering voice of God answered: ‘There’s just something about you that pisses me off.’
STEPHEN KING
Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
ALFONSO THE WISE
Why attack God? He may be as miserable as we are.
ERIK SATIE
I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.
WILLIAM RALPH INGE
If God were to appear in my room, obviously I would be in awe, but I don’t think I would be humble. I might cry, but I think he would dig me like crazy.
MARC BOLAN
If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
JEWISH PROVERB
If God was a woman, she would have made sperm taste like chocolate.
CARRIE SNOW
I would believe only in a God who could dance.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Each attempt at defining God is like placing a pebble on Brighton beach: some are a few feet nearer the water than others, but that doesn’t mean much when the place one is trying to approach is North Africa.
PAUL HANDLEY
My Me is God, nor do I recognise any other Me except my God Himself.
SAINT CATHERINE OF GENOA
The nature of God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
EMPEDOCLES
God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
God is beauty.
SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI
God speaks to us every day, but we don’t know how to listen.
MAHATMA GHANDI
Remember me. I will remember you.
THE QUR’AN 2:152
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
GALILEO GALILEI
The sun, with all those planets revolving round it and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
GALILEO GALILEI
One argument against God is how can he have the time to be interested in and care for everyone. This quote goes some way to solving this. The sun knows how a bunch of grapes is to be ripened. God stands in the same relationship to us. Be who you are, you are designed to work to live, as a pair of skis is designed to carve the turn. Stop fighting the mountain.
You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say that there are no stars in the heavens during the day? Because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God.
SRI RAMAKRISHNA
There is in God, some say, A deep but dazzling darkness.
HENRY VAUGHAN
Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.
MEISTER ECKHART
Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.
JEAN ROSTAND
Man is certainly stark raving mad. He cannot make a worm, yet he makes gods by the dozens.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
If oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds.
XENOPHANES
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
MARK TWAIN Although it appears in none of his written works, and there are no records of him ever having said it.
Don’t play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty.
HARRY VARDON
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
DAVE BARRY
Rugger forwards can lose their temper and play the game of their lives; so, I believe, can bowlers. Golfers, never. Lose your temper and you are done. Or, more insidious, get into a mood of self-pity and you are worse done.
PATRICK DICKINSON
I could never believe in a game where the one who hits the ball least wins.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organisation. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organised along the lines of the Mafia.
KURT VONNEGUT
Unfortunately, goodness and honour are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses.
CESARE LOMBROSO
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
GEORGE ORWELL
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer’s need.
PEDRO CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA
The Good is one, though it is called by many names, sometimes wisdom, sometimes God, and sometimes reason.
EUCLEIDES OF MEGARA He was so devoted to his teacher Socrates that when the Megarians were banned from Athens he dressed up as woman to visit him.
Gossip needn’t be false to be evil – there’s a lot of truth that shouldn’t be passed around.
FRANK CLARK
No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
ALICE ROOSEVELT LONGWORTH Teddy Roosevelt’s unconventional, hedonistic daughter became Mrs L. or ‘the other Washington Monument’: a formidable political institution in her own right for almost a century. She liked this quote so much she had it embroidered on a pillow for her couch.
It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
WILL DURANT
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
H. L. MENCKEN
Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed.
WILLIAM PENN
The punishment which wise men who refuse to take part in government suffer is to live under the government of worse men.
PLATO
The ideal form of government is democracy tempered by assassination.
VOLTAIRE
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
HELEN KELLER
Nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass, finely shorn.
FRANCIS BACON
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
ZEN SAYING
Grass is the cheapest plant to install and the most expensive to maintain.
PAT HOWELL
Why is thought, being a secretion of the brain, more wonderful than gravity – a property of matter?
CHARLES DARWIN
It’s a good thing we have gravity, or else when birds died they’d just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.
STEVEN WRIGHT
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
THOMAS CARLYLE
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
WERNHER VON BRAUN
The price of greatness is responsibility.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
MARK TWAIN
No truly great man ever thought himself so.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
A great man’s failures to understand define him.
ANDRÉ GIDE
Distance makes the mountain blue, and the man great.
ICELANDIC PROVERB
The three signs of great men are – generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.
OTTO VON BISMARCK
What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.
HENRY MAINE
The best chance of reproducing the ancient Greek temperament would be to cross the Scots with the Chinese.
HUGH MACDIARMID
Almost all of the hypotheses that have dominated modern philosophy were first thought of by the Greeks.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
After shaking hands with a Greek, count your fingers.
ALBANIAN PROVERB