Cultivation Quotes - Page 3

In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other.

John Stuart Mill

Sex, Age, Slavery

John Stuart Mill (2016). “The Subjection of Women: Mill's Works”, p.5, VM eBooks

4 Copy quote

Show source
When a buddha is painted, not only a clay altar or lump of earth is used, but the thirty-two marks, a blade of grass, and the cultivation of wisdom for incalculable eons are used. As a Buddha has been painted on a single scroll in this way, all buddhas are painted buddhas, and all painted buddhas are actual buddhas.

Dogen

Two, Religion, Way

6 Copy quote
The cultivation of one set of faculties tends to the disuse of others. The loss of one faculty sharpens others; the blind are sensitive in touch. Has not the extreme cultivation of the commercial faculty permitted others as essential to national life, to be blighted by disease?

Judith Ellen Foster

Loss, Essentials, Disease

4 Copy quote
We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practically, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger and larger class.

Ida Tarbell

Art, Business, Class

Ida M. Tarbell (2009). “The History of the Standard Oil Company”, p.284, Cosimo, Inc.

26 Copy quote

Show source
Not only do these abominable weapons lie buried in silence and in their millions waiting to kill or maim innocent women and children; but the presence or even the fear of the presence of a single landmine can prevent the cultivation of an entire field, rob a whole village of its livelihood, place yet another obstacle on a country's road to reconstruction and development

Kofi Annan

Country, Children, Lying

18 Copy quote
By the ruler's cultivation of his own character there is set up the example of the course which all should pursue.

Confucius

Love, Inspirational, Funny

6 Copy quote
Grace is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation; or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them "elegant" animals would be absurd.

Richard Whately

Girl, Character, Animal

Elizabeth Jane Whately, Richard Whately (1860). “A Selection of English Synonyms”, p.59

4 Copy quote

Show source
When your practice has led you to experiences that you can't understand, you need a better theory. Otherwise, if you try to understand these transcendent experiences with 'profane' or, we might say, 'materialistic' ways of thinking, your cultivation will be set back.

Betty Sue Flowers

Thinking, Practice, Experience

Peter M. Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers (2005). “Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society”, p.226, Crown Business

4 Copy quote

Show source
Whenever education and refinement carry us away from the common people, they are growing towards selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. That is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellow people is not God's refinement.

Henry Ward Beecher

People, Evil, Giving

4 Copy quote
The realization of our soul has its moral and its spiritual side. The moral side represents training of unselfishness, control of desire; the spiritual side represents sympathy and love. They should be taken together and never separated. The cultivation of the merely moral side of our nature leads us to the dark region of narrowness and hardness of heart, to the intolerant arrogance of goodness; and the cultivation of the merely spiritual side of our nature leads us to a still darker region of revelry in intemperance of imagination.

Rabindranath Tagore

Spiritual, Taken, Heart

Rabindranath Tagore, Mohit Kumar Ray (2007). “Essays”, p.90, Atlantic Publishers & Dist

14 Copy quote

Show source
Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.

Gore Vidal

Weed, Flower, Criticism

Gore Vidal (1968). “Sex, Death, and Money”

10 Copy quote

Show source
Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Book, People, Mind

7 Copy quote
... in the present State of America, our welfare and prosperity depend upon the cultivation of our lands and turning the produce of them to the best advantage.

George Washington

Land, America, Prosperity

George Washington, John Clement Fitzpatrick, David Maydole Matteson (1786). “The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745-1799”

4 Copy quote

Show source
Next to selfishness the principal cause which makes life unsatisfactory is want of mental cultivation.

John Stuart Mill

Selfishness, Want, Next

John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.105, Hackett Publishing

7 Copy quote

Show source
Forgiveness entails the authentic acceptance of our own worthiness as human beings, the understanding that mistakes are opportunities for growth, awareness and the cultivation of compassion, and the realization that the extension of love to ourselves and others is the glue that holds the universe together. Forgiveness...is not a set of behaviors, but an attitude.

Joan Z. Borysenko

Forgiveness, Attitude, Mistake

9 Copy quote
. . .nature is still predominant, and there are those who regret that with the improvements of cultivation the sublimity of the wilderness should pass away: for those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, affect the mind with a more deep toned emotion than aught which the hand of man has touched. Amid them the consequent associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.

Thomas Cole

Nature, Regret, Men

51 Copy quote
Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.

Chinua Achebe

Morning, Men, Yield

118 Copy quote
When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into the cultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the result may become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated over with the result of its own endeavor to be attractive.

Jane Addams

Integrity, Character, May

Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.129, Youcanprint

4 Copy quote

Show source
The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Learning, Past, Romance

4 Copy quote
For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Bible, Taken, Law

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1853). “The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an Introductory Essay Upon His Philosophical and Theological Opinions”, p.611

4 Copy quote

Show source
When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness—we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Letting Go, Hope, Circles

Jon Kabat-Zinn (2005). “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life”, Hyperion

9 Copy quote

Show source
In the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Education, Accomplishment, Understanding

Mary Wollstonecraft (2013). “Vindication of the Rights of Women”, p.20, Lulu.com

8 Copy quote

Show source
Women govern us; let us render them perfect: the more they are enlightened, so much the more shall we be. On the cultivation of the mind of women depends the wisdom of men. It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Women, Writing, Heart

16 Copy quote
In a thousand voices singing the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's "Messiah," it is possible to distinguish the leading voices, but the differences of training and cultivation between them and the voices in the chorus, are lost in the unity of purpose and in the fact that they are all human voices lifted by a high motive.

Jane Addams

Voice, Differences, Unity

Jane Addams (2012). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.82, Courier Corporation

9 Copy quote

Show source
Let us hopethat by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Abraham Lincoln

Happiness, Onward And Upward, Political

Abraham Lincoln (1999). “The Wit & Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: A Treasury of Quotations, Anecdotes, and Observations”, Gramercy

4 Copy quote

Show source