“Love is often described as a fruit you can just reach out with your hand and pluck. However, one should beware, that although glowing in color, the fruit could be poisonous, tainted, or rotten.”
1986
Related quotes
“Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit.”
Variant: Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit. We must be rooted in Jesus Christ.
“In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.”
The Arrow of Gold http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/argld10h.htm (1919), Author's note,
As quoted in Love, A Fruit Always In Season : Daily Meditations from the Words of Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1987) http://books.google.com/books?id=GqcnHzdPwPcC edited by Dorothy S. Hunt
1980s
“Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.”
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo
Preface
What is Property? (1840)
“Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. ”
Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)
Context: I am no mere chance pile of flesh and bone: if I were only that, I should fall into corruption and dust before your eyes. I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh: that is what holds me together standing before you in the image of God. … The Word is God. And God is within you. … In so far as you know the truth you have it from my God, who is your heavenly father and mine. He has many names and his nature is manifold. … It is by children who are wiser than their fathers, subjects who are wiser than their emperors, beggars and vagrants who are wiser than their priests, that men rise from being beasts of prey to believing in me and being saved. … By their fruits ye shall know them. Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.