Fertile Quotes

• It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

  T. S. Eliot

  Nature, Struggle, Men

  9 Copy quote

• It became known that I had a rather fertile imagination, when it came to private activities." She stared. "What sort of private activities?" This time he did smile, and it turned his face wicked. "Disrobe, and I'll be happy to demonstrate.

  Ilona Andrews

  Imagination, Wicked, Faces

  4 Copy quote

• Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Country, Freedom, Wells

  17 Copy quote

• Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide - a thread that runs from source to exhausted release.

  Edward Gargan

  Running, Mean, Europe

  5 Copy quote

• Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

  Susan Abulhawa

  Heart, Israel, Skins

  Susan Abulhawa (2010). “Mornings in Jenin”, p.88, Bloomsbury Publishing

  7 Copy quote

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• As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?

  Isabel Allende

  Memories, Lying, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Education, Science, Mind

  29 Copy quote

• The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Earth, Surface, Restlessness

  Kurt Vonnegut (1970). “The Sirens of Titan: An Original Novel”, New York : Dell

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• The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

  Neal Stephenson

  Running, Dna, Growth

  "Snow Crash". Book by Neal Stephenson, 1992.

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• Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground - you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, edit things out, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it's going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation, while writing needs to breathe and move.

  Anne Lamott

  Moving, Writing, Mean

  4 Copy quote

• The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Power, Men, Metaphor

  8 Copy quote

• There had been a popular joke on Freedom, started by a man named Calder. Looking down from space, he had said, the dominant life forms on Earth were obviously the cereals and other grasses. They occupied all the most desirable and fertile land; and they had tamed insects and animals to care for them. In particular, they had domesticated the bipeds to nurture and cultivate them and to save and plant their seed. Now, watching the farmers, Alex could easily imagine that they were worshiping and genuflecting before their masters.

  Larry Niven

  Men, Animal, Space

  Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Michael Flynn (2002). “Fallen Angels”, p.232, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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• Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.

  Orson Scott Card

  Daughter, Home, Tunnels

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “The Ender Quintet”, p.235, Macmillan

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• Power. What do we mean? 'The ability to determine another man's luck.' ...how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. First: God-given gifts of charisma. Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity's topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower -- for want of discipline. Third: the will to power.

  David Mitchell

  Flower, Mean, Maturity

  4 Copy quote

• The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Intelligence, Doe, Use

  7 Copy quote

• Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

  Andrea Gibson

  Fire, Volcanoes, Land

  52 Copy quote

• [Let] the poor the needy and oppressed of the Earth, and those who want Land, resort to the fertile lands of our western country, the second land of Promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment.

  George Washington

  Country, Land, Promise

  Jay A. Parry, Andrew M. Allison, George Washington (1991). “The real George Washington”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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• Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Hands, Revolution, Republican

  4 Copy quote

• The human mind is like a fertile ground were seed are continually being planted. The seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought grows, and it grows. The word is like a seed and the human mind is so fertile!

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Ideas, Mind, Opinion

  4 Copy quote

• In the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, from the prison of past conditioning. Uncertainty is the fertile ground of creativity and freedom.

  Deepak Chopra

  Change, Lying, Creativity

  4 Copy quote

• Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.

  John Green

  Pain, Suffering, New Life

  4 Copy quote

• I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

  Steven Erikson

  Compassion, Hatred, Soil

  5 Copy quote

• Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.

  Dan Brown

  Dark, Men, Law

  9 Copy quote

• Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

  Virginia Woolf

  Giving, Creative, Add

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.232, OUP Oxford

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• A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Men, Thinking, Vocabulary

  Henry Hazlitt, Hans F. Sennholz (1993). “The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt”, Foundation for Economic Education

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