“Sow good services: sweet remembrances will grow from them.”
Quoted in A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1880) collected and translated by J. D. Finod, p. 138
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Anne Louise Germaine de Staël 42
Swiss author 1766–1817Related quotes
Source: The Flame is Green (1971), Ch. 5 : Muerte De Boscaje
Context: “The world is a garden,” the old man said. “It is a farm, a plantation, a sheep-ranch. In the garden are the cities also; they too are a great part of the planting. Believe me, all these plantations are sowed with good seed. But the Enemy from the Beginning also sows the red blight: these are the charlocks, the tares, called zizania in the Vulgate. Do not be fooled as to what it is and who sowed it. Do not be fooled in the factory or the arsenal, in the ship-yard or the shop; do not be fooled on the bleak farms or in the crowded city, in the club or in the workers’ hall or in the drawing room. The wrong thing that is sowed is the red weed, the red blight. And the Enemy has done this.
"Or let us say that we have a green thing growing forever. Everything that is done is done by it. And on it we also have the red parasite crunching forever: and everything that is undone is undone by that. The parasite will present itself as a modern thing. It will call itself the Great Change. Less often, and warily, it will call itself the Great Renewal. But it can never be another thing than the Red Failure returned. It is a disease, it is a scarlet fever, a typhoid, a diphtheria; it is the Africa disease, it is the red leprosy, it is the crab-cancer. It is the death of the individual and of the corporate soul. And incidentally, but very often, it is also the death of the individual and of the corporate body. We are asked to swear fealty to the parasite disease which the enemy sowed from the beginning. I will not do it, and I hope that you will not."
Source: The Three Musketeers (1844), Ch. 67: Conclusion.
(J. Hudson Taylor. Separation and Service: Or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. London: Morgan & Scott, n.d., 10).
“All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.”
1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)
“Whoever sows good shall harvest happiness, and whoever sows evil shall harvest regret.”
Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.78, p. 338
Religious Wisdom
"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)
“Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.”
Letter XXVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
“We are the earth his word must sow like wheat
And, if it finds no earth, it cannot grow.”
Innkeeper's wife
A Child is Born (1942)
Context: We are the earth his word must sow like wheat
And, if it finds no earth, it cannot grow.
We are his earth, the mortal and the dying,
Led by no star — the sullen and the slut,
The thief, the selfish man, the barren woman,
Who have betrayed him once and will betray him,
Forget his words, be great a moment's space
Under the strokes of chance,
And then sink back into our small affairs.
And yet, unless we go, his message fails.
The Rubaiyat (1120)