“Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.”

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 338
Religious Wisdom

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 71

You Never Can Tell (1895).
Poetry quotes
Context: p>You never can tell when you do an act
Just what the result will be;
But with every deed you are sowing a seed,
Though the harvest you may not see.
Each kindly act is an acorn dropped
In God's productive soil;
You may not know, yet the tree shall grow
And shelter the brows that toil.You never can tell what your thoughts will do
In bringing you hate or love;
For thoughts are things, and their airy wings
Are swifter than carrier doves.
They follow the law of the universe —
Each thing must create its kind;
And they speed o'er the track to bring you back
Whatever went out from your mind.</p

The Road Back to Nature (1984; English translation 1987, p. 360).

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: The question to be tried by you is whether a man has the right to express his honest thought; and for that reason there can be no case of greater importance submitted to a jury. And it may be well enough for me, at the outset, to admit that there could be no case in which I could take a greater — a deeper interest. For my part, I would not wish to live in a world where I could not express my honest opinions. Men who deny to others the right of speech are not fit to live with honest men.
I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips — to make the tongue a convict. I passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.
A man has a right to work with his hands, to plow the earth, to sow the seed, and that man has a right to reap the harvest. If we have not that right, then all are slaves except those who take these rights from their fellow-men.

The Rubaiyat (1120)

March 30, 1961, as quoted in Edmund J. Keller (1991) Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People's Republic, Indiana University Press, page 131