Quotes about cultivator
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Brené Brown photo
Brené Brown photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Jean Cocteau photo
Carl Sagan photo
Confucius photo

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The Analects, The Great Learning
Context: The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the Kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.
Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their persons were cultivated. Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy.
From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides.

James Baldwin photo

“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next — one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the next.
Autobiographical Notes (1952)

Marguerite Yourcenar photo
Elbert Hubbard photo

“Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul
Thich Nhat Hanh photo
Emily Brontë photo
Jane Addams photo

“These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

"The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/addams6.htm; this piece by Jane Addams was first published in 1892 and later appeared as chapter six of Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
Context: These young people accomplish little toward the solution of this social problem, and bear the brunt of being cultivated into unnourished, oversensitive lives. They have been shut off from the common labor by which they live which is a great source of moral and physical health. They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of coördination between thought and action. I think it is hard for us to realize how seriously many of them are taking to the notion of human brotherhood, how eagerly they long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal. These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes which may be thus loosely formulated; that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Toni Morrison photo
Lisa See photo
Bill Cosby photo

“The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.”

Bill Cosby (1937) American actor, comedian, author, producer, musician, activist

Originally from Stuart Chase
Misattributed

Noah Webster photo

“The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.”

Noah Webster (1758–1843) lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, writer, editor and author
Robert Greene photo
Henry David Thoreau photo

“A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden, or Life in the Woods

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.”
A: Quod est enim maius argumentum nihil eam prodesse quam quosdam perfectos philosophos turpiter vivere? M: Nullum vero id quidem argumentum est. Nam ut agri non omnes frugiferi sunt qui coluntur [...] sic animi non omnes culti fructum ferunt. Atque, ut in eodem simili verser, ut ager quamvis fertilis sine cultura fructuosus esse non potest, sic sine doctrina animus; ita est utraque res sine altera debilis. Cultura autem animi philosophia est; haec extrahit vitia radicitus et praeparat animos ad satus accipiendos eaque mandat eis et, ut ita dicam, serit, quae adulta fructus uberrimos ferant.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, Chapter V; translation by Andrew P. Peabody
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)
Context: A: For what stronger proof can there be of its [philosophy's] uselessness than that some accomplished philosophers lead disgraceful lives?
M: It is no proof at all; for as all cultivated fields are not harvest-yielding [... ] so all cultivated minds do not bear fruit. To continue the figure – as a field, though fertile, cannot yield a harvest without cultivation, no more can the mind without learning; thus each is feeble without the other. But philosophy is the cultivation of the soul. It draws out vices by the root, prepares the mind to receive seed, and commits to it, and, so to speak, sows in it what, when grown, may bear the most abundant fruit.

John Bevere photo
Dallas Willard photo
Jon Kabat-Zinn photo

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”

Jon Kabat-Zinn (1944) American academic

Source: Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

George MacDonald photo
Booker T. Washington photo
Samuel Johnson photo

“Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 3

Slobodan Milošević photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Alfred Russel Wallace photo
Thomas Jefferson photo
James Finlay Weir Johnston photo

“Among the friends and patrons of the society at York who paid kind and hospitable attention to those whom the love of science had brought to the meeting, the clergy must not be passed over in silence. They had been the zealous promoters of the meeting; had done much towards facilitating the preliminary arrangements; and exerted themselves by their influence and example to secure to the association that respect and general attention which it deserved, and which at York it amply received. To the church, therefore, the British Association is deeply indebted; and convinced, as I am, that true religion and true science ever lead to the same great end, manifesting and exalting the glory and goodness of the great object of our common worship, I trust that the firmer the association is established, and the more influential it becomes, the more willing and the more efficient an ally it will prove in the cause of religion. While in former times science was said to lead to infidelity, because then it was less profoundly studied, or with less zeal for truth, it is one of the happy characters of the science of this day that it renders men more devout; and it is a pleasing evidence that such is the received opinion, when discerning and educated men — the friends and teachers of religion — of all ranks, step forward not only to patronize science, but to enlist themselves among its cultivators, and to distinguish those who have most successfully advanced it.”

James Finlay Weir Johnston (1796–1855) Scottish agricultural chemist

Report of the First Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science held at York in September 1831. By James F. W. Johnston, A. M. &c. &c. As found in David Brewster's The Edinburgh Journal Of Science. Vol. 8 https://archive.org/stream/edinburghjourna09brewgoog#page/n29/mode/2up, p. 29.

“Tai chi chuan (taìjíqúan) is a Taoist practice emphasizing cultivation of martial ethics.”

Wu Kung-tsao (1902–1983) Chinese martial artist

Wu Family T'ai Chi Ch'uan (1980)

Aimé Césaire photo
Walker Percy photo
John Stuart Mill photo
Marcus Manilius photo

“It is easy to spread the sails to propitious winds, and to cultivate in different ways a rich soil, and to give lustre to gold and ivory, when the very raw material itself shines.”
Facile est ventis dare vela secundis, Fecundumque solum varias agitare per artes, Auroque atque ebori decus addere, cum rudis ipsa Materies niteat.

Book III, line 26.
Astronomica

Vanna Bonta photo
William Hazlitt photo
David Lloyd George photo
B. Alan Wallace photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Boris Sidis photo
Alexander Hamilton photo
James Branch Cabell photo
Gabriele Münter photo

“As I came to Munich in 1901 it was in a period of great artistic renewal. Jugendstil began in its way to attack the old naturalism and to cultivate the qualities of pure line.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

as quoted in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 11

Joseph Addison photo
Daniel Webster photo

“Suppose that, by some new discovery, or some improved mode of culture, only one per cent could be added to the annual results of English cultivation; this, of itself, would materially affect the comfortable subsistence of millions of human beings.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

On the Agriculture of England (1840)

Ahad Ha'am photo

“We who live abroad are accustomed to believe that almost all Eretz Yisrael is now uninhabited desert and whoever wishes can buy land there as he pleases. But this is not true. It is very difficult to find in the land [ha'aretz] cultivated fields that are not used for planting. Only those sand fields or stone mountains that would require the investment of hard labor and great expense to make them good for planting remain uncultivated and that's because the Arabs do not like working too much in the present for a distant future. Therefore, it is very difficult to find good land for cattle. And not only peasants, but also rich landowners, are not selling good land so easily…We who live abroad are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all wild desert people who, like donkeys, neither see nor understand what is happening around them. But this is a grave mistake. The Arab, like all the Semites, is sharp minded and shrewd. All the townships of Syria and Eretz Yisrael are full of Arab merchants who know how to exploit the masses and keep track of everyone with whom they deal – the same as in Europe. The Arabs, especially the urban elite, see and understand what we are doing and what we wish to do on the land, but they keep quiet and pretend not to notice anything. For now, they do not consider our actions as presenting a future danger to them. … But, if the time comes that our people's life in Eretz Yisrael will develop to a point where we are taking their place, either slightly or significantly, the natives are not going to just step aside so easily.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Wrestling with Zion, pp. 14-15.

Bill Mollison photo
Luther Burbank photo
James Tod photo

“Those who expect from a people like the Hindus a species of composition of precisely the same character as the historical works of Greece and Rome commit the very gregarious error of overlooking the peculiarities which distinguish the natives of India from all other races, and which strongly discriminate their intellectual productions of every kind from those of the West. Their philosophy, their poetry, their architecture, are marked with traits of originality; and the same may be expected to pervade their history, which, like the arts enumerated, took a character from its intimate association with the religion of the people. It must be recollected, moreover,… that the chronicles of all the polished nations of Europe, were, at a much more recent date, as crude, as wild, and as barren, as those of the early Rajputs.” … “My own animadversions upon the defective condition of the annals of Rajwarra have more than once been checked by a very just remark: ‘When our princes were in exile, driven from hold to hold, and compelled to dwell in the clefts of the mountains, often doubtful whether they would not be forced to abandon the very meal preparing for them, was that a time to think of historical records?’ ”… “If we consider the political changes and convulsions which have happened in Hindustan since Mahmood’s invasion, and the intolerant bigotry of many of his successors, we shall be able to account for the paucity of its national works on history, without being driven to the improbable conclusion, that the Hindus were ignorant of an art which has been cultivated in other countries from almost the earliest ages. Is it to be imagined that a nation so highly civilized as the Hindus, amongst whom the exact sciences flourished in perfection, by whom the fine arts, architecture, sculpture, poetry, music, were not only cultivated, but taught and defined by the nicest and most elaborate rules, were totally unacquainted with the simple art of recording the events of their history, the character of their princes and the acts of their reigns?”

James Tod (1782–1835) 1782-1835, English officer of the British East India Company and an Oriental scholar

[The fact appears to be that] “After eight centuries of galling subjection to conquerors totally ignorant of the classical language of the Hindus; after every capital city had been repeatedly stormed and sacked by barbarous, bigoted, and exasperated foes; it is too much to expect that the literature of the country should not have sustained, in common with other interests, irretrievable losses.”
James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, Routledge and Kegan Paul (London,l829,1957), 2 vols., I quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 3

“It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 36.

Ernesto Che Guevara photo
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Park Chung-hee photo

“If we are weak, our country will be in jeopardy. It is the living lesson of human history of the rise and fall of nations. In order for a country not to fall, it must cultivate its own strength.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

As quoted in Toward Peaceful Unification: Selected Speeches & Interviews https://books.google.com/books?id=nNc2AzJmwPoC&pg=PA3&dq=%22There+was+little,+if+any,+feeling+of+loyalty+toward+the+abstract+concept+of+Korea+as+a+nation-state%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=IOkhVebpAYqWsAWOgILoCQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false (1978), Kwangmyong Publishing Company, p. 31.
1970s

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Frederick Douglass photo
Confucius photo
Richard Powers photo
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Margaret Sanger photo

“Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stocks— those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"Apostle of Birth Control Sees Cause Gaining Here", The New York Times, , p. XII http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9C01E1DF1F30E333A2575BC0A9629C946295D6CF.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel photo
Nico Perrone photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo
Richard Cobden photo

“Here is an empire in which is the only relic of the oldest civilization of the world—one which, 2,700 years ago, according to some authorities, had a system of primary education—which had its system of logic before the time of Aristotle, and its code of morals before that of Socrates. Here is a country which has had its uninterrupted traditions and histories for so long a period—that supplied silks and other articles of luxury to the Romans 2,000 years ago! They are the very soul of commerce in the East, and one of the wealthiest nations in the world. They are the most industrious people in Asia, having acquired the name of the ants of the East…You find them not as barbarians at home, where they cultivate all the arts and sciences, and where they have carried all, except one, to a point of perfection but little below our own—but that one is war. You have there a people who have carried agriculture to a state of horticulture, and whose great cities rival in population those of the Western world. Now, there must be something in such a people deserving of respect. If in speaking of them we stigmatize them as barbarians, and threaten them with force because we say they are inaccessible to reason, it must be because we do not understand them; because their ways are not our ways, nor our ways theirs. Now, is not so venerable an empire as that deserving of some sympathy—at least of some justice—at the hands of conservative England?”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1857/feb/26/resolutions-moved-debate-adjourned in the House of Commons (26 February 1857) on China.
1850s

Calvin Coolidge photo
Jacob Mendes Da Costa photo
John Tyler photo

“So far as it depends on the course of this government, our relations of good will and friendship will be sedulously cultivated with all nations.”

John Tyler (1790–1862) American politician, 10th President of the United States (in office from 1841 to 1845)

First annual message to Congress (1 June 1841).

Li Hongzhi photo

“Although Qigong has been spread for quite a long period of time, several decades already, no one knows its real implications. Therefore, I have written in the book, Zhuan Falun, everything about certain phenomena in the Qigong community, why Qigong is spread in ordinary human society, and what the ultimate goal of Qigong is. Therefore, this book is a systematic work that enables one to practice cultivation. Through reading it repeatedly, many people feel that there is something unique about the book: no matter how many times you have read this book, you always seem to feel a sense of freshness, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always attain a different understanding from the same sentence, and no matter how many times you have read it, you always feel that there is still a great deal of content in it that is yet to be found. Why is it this way, then? It is because that I have systematically compiled many things that are considered heavenly secrets within this book, such as that people are able to practice cultivation, how cultivation should be practiced, and the characteristics of this universe, etc. For a practitioner, it can enable him to complete his cultivation practice successfully. Because no one has ever done such a thing in the past, when reading this book, many people find that a lot of the contents are heavenly secrets. After races are mixed up, you will find one's child born to be an infant of mixed blood. However, there is a partition in the middle of this child's life. If it is separated, he will be physically and intellectually incomplete or a person with an incomplete body. Modern science also knows that it is getting worse one generation after another. It would be like this”

Li Hongzhi (1951) Chinese religious leader and dissident

Falun Buddha Fa Lecture in Sydney http://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/lectures/1996L.html

Lewis Mumford photo
D. V. Gundappa photo

“But a nationalist shall not merely have control over these weakness but would cultivate the qualities of politeness and cordiality.”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=20
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

Henry Stephens Salt photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Samuel Gompers photo

“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

The Shoe workers' journal, Volume 16‎ (1915) p. 4
Variant: What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge. We want more … opportunities to cultivate our better natures.

Alasdair MacIntyre photo
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David Boaz photo
Thomas Little Heath photo
Mahadev Govind Ranade photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Keir Hardie photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“Privacy is a type of conversation. Firms should view privacy not as some inconvenient obsession of customers that must be snuck around but more as a way to cultivate a genuine relationship.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

David Brewster photo
Georg Brandes photo
John Buchan photo
Lucian Truscott photo
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe photo

“Love does not dominate, it cultivates. And that is more.”

Die Liebe herrscht nicht, aber sie bildet; und das ist mehr!
Das Märchen (1795), as translated by Hermann J. Weigand in Wisdom and Experience (1949); also translated elsewhere as The Fairy-Tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, and simply The Tale]
Variant translations:
Love does not rule; but it trains, and that is more.
As translated by Thomas Carlyle The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1832)
Love rules (and reigns) not, but it forms (builds and 'trains'); and that is more!
As quoted in "'Human Immortalities : The Old and the New" by Thaddeus Burr Wakeman, in The Open Court Vol. XX, No. 1 (January 1906), p. 104