“The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.”
Discourse no. 6; vol. 1, pp. 157-8.
Discourses on Art
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Joshua Reynolds22
English painter, specialising in portraits 1723–1792Related quotes
David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.
“The ashes of your existence will fertilize the soil for the universe to follow.”
Richard Kadrey (1957) San Francisco-based novelist, freelance writer, and photographer
Source: Sandman Slim
Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition
p. 345 http://books.google.com/books?id=zAhJAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA345, as cited in Ruffin (1852, p. 85). <br class="br">The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section III: Agronomy
Eugene P. Odum (1913–2002) mathematician, ecologist, natural philosopher, and systems ecologist
Eugene Odum (1993) Ecology and our endangered life-support systems. p. 143
George Washington Carver (1864–1943) botanist
The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South (Tuskegee Institute, 1902)
Steve Maraboli (1975)
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 89
“Every soil does not produce every material.”
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) French economist
§ 2
Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766)
Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist
Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 8.12