Quotes about seed
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James Thurber photo
George Eliot photo

“He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences – perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting prudence.
In this point of trusting in some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 73-74)

Bill Mollison photo
T. E. Lawrence photo
Thomas Creech photo
Frederick William Robertson photo
Brigham Young photo

“Now hear it, O inhabitants of the earth, Jew and Gentile, Saint and sinner! When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him. He helped to make and organize this world. He is MICHAEL, the Archangel, the ANCIENT OF DAYS! about whom holy men have written and spoken-He is our FATHER and our GOD, and the only God with whom WE have to do. Every man upon the earth, professing Christians or non-professing, must hear it, and will know it sooner or later. They came here, organized the raw material, and arranged in their order the herbs of the field, the trees, the apple, the peach, the plum, the pear, and every other fruit that is desirable and good for man; the seed was brought from another sphere, and planted in this earth. The thistle, the thorn, the brier, and the obnoxious weed did not appear until after the earth was cursed. When Adam and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit, their bodies became mortal from its effects, and therefore their offspring were mortal…It is true that the earth was organized by three distinct characters, namely, Eloheim, Yahovah, and Michael, these three forming a quorum, as in all heavenly bodies, and in organizing element, perfectly represented in the Deity, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 1:50-51 (April 9, 1852)
This concept is commonly referred to as the "Adam–God theory."
1850s

Theodor Mommsen photo

“It is a dreadful picture—this picture of Italy under the rule of the oligarchy. There was nothing to bridge over or soften the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world of the rich. The more clearly and painfully this contrast was felt on both sides—the giddier the height to which riches rose, the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned—the more frequently, amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard, were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again from the top to the bottom. The wider the chasm by which the two worlds were externally divided, the more completely they coincided in the like annihilation of family life—which is yet the germ and core of all nationality—in the like laziness and luxury, the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence, the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property. Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy, and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly with awful silence. It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a— hypocritically whitewashed—moral and political corruption of the nation. All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man, be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again similar fruits to reap.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Italy under the Oligarchy
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Emma Goldman photo
Edith Hamilton photo
Stephenie LaGrossa photo
Alexander Maclaren photo
James Inhofe photo
Masanobu Fukuoka photo

“My ultimate dream is to sow seeds in the desert. To revegetate the deserts is to sow seed in people's hearts.”

Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2007) Japanese farmer and philosopher

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

Thomas Merton photo
Paul Allen photo

“In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it.”

Paul Allen (1953–2018) American inventor, investor and philanthropist

Idea Man (2012)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Theodor Mommsen photo

“We have reached the end of the Roman republic. We have seen it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to rum in politics and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy of Caesar. There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all true delight in life. It was indeed an old world; and even the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar [b] could not make it young again. The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in and run its course. But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon; and when at length after a long historical night a new day dawned once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up, and which were and are indebted to him for their national individuality.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

/b
Vol. 4, Pt. 2, Translated by W.P. Dickson.
Last paragraph of the last volume
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Christopher Hitchens photo
Tertullian photo

“We multiply whenever we are mown down by you; the blood of Christians is seed.”
Plures efficimur, quoties metimur a vobis; semen est sanguis christianorum.

Apologeticus, 50, s. 13
Often quoted as ‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’
Variant translation: As often as we are mown down by you, the more we grow in numbers; the blood of the Christians is the seed. Another common translation is "The blood of the Martyrs is the seed of Christians."
Apologeticus pro Christianis

Sri Aurobindo photo
Joe Strummer photo
George Eliot photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Carl Sagan photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Steve Kilbey photo
Kevin Kelly photo

“The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Joel Fuhrman photo
Hugh Plat photo
William Carlos Williams photo
DJ Paul photo

“I'm just producing and writing for all my new artists I signed, Weirdo King and my nephews The Seed of 6ix. Also been writing a lot of EDM for kids. Doing more cooking videos and TV.”

DJ Paul (1977) American rapper and record producer

Interview with DJ Paul – Stream DJ Paul Kom's 'Undergroud, Vol. 17 – For da Summa Album http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/09/dj-paul-underground-vol-17-for-da-summa-album/

B. W. Powe photo

“Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.”

B. W. Powe (1955) Canadian writer

Third Meditation, p. 157
Towards a Canada of Light (2006)

Bob Dylan photo

“Well, God is in His heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 (1991), Blind Willie McTell (recorded 1983)

Joseph F. Smith photo
Peter D. Schiff photo
Kate Bush photo

“What am I singing?
A song of seeds — The food of love. Eat the music.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Red Shoes (1993)

H. Rider Haggard photo
Stephen R. Donaldson photo
Ramakrishna photo
Woodrow Wilson photo

“The seed of revolution is repression.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

7th annual message to Congress http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29560 (2 December 1919)
1910s

William Vaughn Moody photo
Bernard Mandeville photo
Mike Huckabee photo

“I was an apprentice to a linnen-draper when this king was born, and continued at the trade some years, but the shop being too narrow and short for my large mind, I took leave of my master, but said nothing. Then I lived a country-life for some years; and in the late wars I was a soldier, and sometimes had the honour and misfortune to lodg and dislodg an army. In the year 1G52, I entred upon iron works, and pli'd them several years, and in them times I made it my business to survey the three great rivers of England, and some small ones; and made two navigable, and a third almost compleated. I next studied the great weakness of the rye-lands, and the surfeit it was then under by reason of their long tillage. I did by practick and theorick find out the reason of its defection, as also of its recovery, and applyed the remedy in putting out two books, which were so fitted to the country-man's capacity, that he fell on pell-mell; and I hope, and partly know, that great part of Worcestershire, Glocestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, have doubled the value of the land by the husbandry discovered to them; see my two books printed by Mr Sawbridg on Ludgate Hill, entitled, Yarranton's Improvement ly Clover, and there thou mayest be further satisfied.* I also for many years served the countreys with the seed, and at last gave them the knowledg of getting it with ease and small trouble; and what I have been doing since, my book tells you at large.”

Andrew Yarranton (1619–1684) English civil engineer

Source: Quotes from England's Improvement, (1677), p. 193; cited in Patrick Edward Dove (1854, p. 405-6)

William Soutar photo
James Anthony Froude photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Will Eisner photo

“When it comes to getting away, big pits are a handicap. A quarter-pound seed isn't going to be blown about by anything less than a hurricane, and in water an avocado pit sinks.”

Roger Swain (1949) American television personality

p. 11 https://books.google.com/books?id=UutGAAAAYAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=handicap
Field Days: Journal of an Itinerant Biologist (1983)

Josh Billings photo

“I had rather be a pot-bellied seed cowcumber, flung carelessly on a wood pile to ripen, than tew be an old bachelor.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Baba Amte photo
Muhammad Iqbál photo
Richard Feynman photo
John Addington Symonds photo

“No seed shall perish which the soul hath sown.”

John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) English poet and literary critic

Sonnet. Versöhnung. A Belief.

Robert Charles Wilson photo
Hugh Plat photo
Jaclyn Victor photo
Josh Homme photo

“Yeah, I can make all the tequila in a bottle disappear. It’s a talent. Nothing comes easy and talent is something you get but, if you don’t develop it, it becomes like an apple; you keep taking bites of it until it’s gone. So you have to plant the seeds. Then you have the orchard. And then you have Jonestown.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

Reported in Eddy Lawrence, " Josh Homme: Interview http://www.timeout.com/london/music/features/4199/Josh_Homme-interview.html", Time Out London (February 5, 2008).

Henry Ward Beecher photo
Henryk Sienkiewicz photo
James Inhofe photo
Rose Wilder Lane photo
Edward Thomson photo
Otto Weininger photo
Viktor Schauberger photo

“The empowered mind allows problems to seed personal growth.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 159

Alasdair Gray photo
Gao Xingjian photo
Theo Jansen photo
Henry Miller photo
William Morris photo
Don Soderquist photo

“I believe there are hundreds and thousands of stories just waiting to be written by organizations and companies who have leaders that inspire people to accomplish things that seem impossible. The only way that can happen, though, is if the leader believes it is possible—has even a mustard seed of faith—and can convince his people that the seemingly impossible is indeed possible.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 106.
On Leading Well

James A. Garfield photo

“Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

John William Gardner, No easy victories (1968), p. 39
Misattributed

Robert Hunter photo
William Watson (poet) photo

“All resistance bears within it the seeds of growth, experience, and wisdom.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 101

Báb photo
Gautama Buddha photo
Norman Mailer photo
Tanith Lee photo
John Updike photo

“There had been a lot of death in the newspapers lately. […] and then before Christmas that Pan Am Flight 103 ripping open like a rotten melon five miles above Scotland and dropping all these bodies and flaming wreckage all over the golf course and the streets of this little town like Glockamorra, what was its real name, Lockerbie. Imagine sitting there in your seat being lulled by the hum of the big Rolls-Royce engines and the stewardesses bringing the clinking drinks caddy and the feeling of having caught the plane and nothing to do now but relax and then with a roar and a giant ripping noise and scattered screams this whole cozy world dropping away and nothing under you but black space and your chest squeezed by the terrible unbreathable cold, that cold you can scarcely believe is there but that you sometimes actually feel still packed into the suitcases, stored in the unpressurised hold, when you unpack your clothes, the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still in them. […] Those bodies with hearts pumping tumbling down in the dark. How much did they know as they fell, through air dense like tepid water, tepid gray like this terminal where people blow through like dust in an air duct, to the airline we're all just numbers on the computer, one more or less, who cares? A blip on the screen, then no blip on the screen. Those bodies tumbling down like wet melon seeds.”

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Eugene J. Martin photo

“Can someone eat the fruit that comes from the tree of action that grows from the seeds of your mind?”

Eugene J. Martin (1938–2005) American artist

from E.J. Martin's website at http://morayeel.louisiana.edu/ejMARTIN/ejMARTIN-artist.html and http://www.neoimages.net/statement.aspx?id=1312

Gautama Buddha photo
Czeslaw Milosz photo

“They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Dedication" (1945), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz
Rescue (1945)

Don Soderquist photo

“Your culture can sow both the seeds of success and failure in your organization.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 42.
On the Importance of Culture

Oliver Cowdery photo
Aron Ra photo

“When I read the gospels, I don’t see a wise and benevolent sage imparting truth. I see a religious extremist and faith-healer, who is just as much of a scam artist as any of the exorcists still practicing today. Remember that Jesus taught his disciples how to do faith healing too, just like tele-evangelists still do. Jesus didn’t believe in washing your hands because he didn’t know about pathogens. He believed in demons instead. And he cursed a fig tree because he didn’t know they were out-of-season. Likewise he didn’t know that the farmers of his day already knew about other seeds that were smaller than mustard seeds. My best evidence was Jesus’ complaint that the people who knew him since childhood wouldn’t buy any of his bullshit. So the only indications I had to believe in a historic Jesus were the very points that implied that he could not be a god nor have any real connection to God. So there are only two possibilities: Jesus was either an ignorant 1st century charlatan and cult leader heavily exaggerated like Robin Hood, or he’s a completely imaginary legendary figure like Hercules. Remember how Jesus said that he came not to bring peace but a sword; that he would divide husbands from their wives and children from their parents all on behalf of beliefs based on faith? Remember also that faith, (an unreasonable assertion of complete conviction which is not based on reason and is defended against all reason) —is the most dishonest position it is possible to have. Any belief which requires faith should be rejected for that reason.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"Jesus never existed" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/11/03/jesus-never-existed/, Patheos (November 3, 2015)
Patheos

Mengistu Neway photo

“I must die so as to see again those who died before, and to tell them the seed we sowed has taken root.”

Mengistu Neway (1919–1961) Commander of the Ethiopian Imperial Bodyguard

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