Fertile Quotes

• It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.

  T. S. Eliot

  Nature, Struggle, Men

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• I think genetic research is a fascinating and fertile area.

  Katherine Dunn

  Thinking, Research, Areas

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• In general, a fact is worth more than theories in the long run. The theory stimulates, but the fact builds. The former in due time is replaced by one better but the fact remains and becomes fertile.

  Theobald Smith

  Running, Science, Long

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• Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Knowledge, Science, Light

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.419, Simon and Schuster

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• One naturally asks, what was the use of this great engine set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the earth? We have our answer in the fertile soil which spreads over the temperate regions of the globe. The glacier was God's great plough.

  Louis Agassiz

  God, Science, Age

  Louis Agassiz (1876). “Geological Sketches”

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• Republican despotism is more fertile in acts of tyranny, because everyone has a hand in it.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Hands, Revolution, Republican

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• Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide - a thread that runs from source to exhausted release.

  Edward Gargan

  Running, Mean, Europe

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• [Let] the poor the needy and oppressed of the Earth, and those who want Land, resort to the fertile lands of our western country, the second land of Promise, and there dwell in peace, fulfilling the first and great commandment.

  George Washington

  Country, Land, Promise

  Jay A. Parry, Andrew M. Allison, George Washington (1991). “The real George Washington”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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• In the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, from the prison of past conditioning. Uncertainty is the fertile ground of creativity and freedom.

  Deepak Chopra

  Change, Lying, Creativity

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• The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  Intelligence, Doe, Use

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• Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Country, Freedom, Wells

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• Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.

  Andrea Gibson

  Fire, Volcanoes, Land

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• Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

  Susan Abulhawa

  Heart, Israel, Skins

  Susan Abulhawa (2010). “Mornings in Jenin”, p.88, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Power. What do we mean? 'The ability to determine another man's luck.' ...how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. First: God-given gifts of charisma. Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity's topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower -- for want of discipline. Third: the will to power.

  David Mitchell

  Flower, Mean, Maturity

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• The human mind is like a fertile ground were seed are continually being planted. The seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought grows, and it grows. The word is like a seed and the human mind is so fertile!

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Ideas, Mind, Opinion

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• Chaos was the natural law of the universe. Indifference was the engine of entropy. Man's apathy was the fertile ground in which the dark spirits tended their seeds.

  Dan Brown

  Dark, Men, Law

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• Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer.

  Victor Hugo

  Art, Science, Ladders

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• The mind is like a fertile garden in which anything that is planted, flowers or weeds, will grow.

  Bruce Lee

  Weed, Spiritual, Wisdom

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• It's what each of us sows, and how, that gives us character and prestige. Seeds of kindness, goodwill, and human understanding, planted in fertile soil, spring up into deathless friendships, big deeds of worth, and a memory that will not soon fade out. We are all sowers of seeds-and let us never forget it!

  George Matthew Adams

  Life, Friendship, Kindness

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• If we carry this line of argument to its logical conclusion, the meaning of life consists of the flaws in one's conceptions and what one does about them. Life can be seen as a fertile fallacy.

  George Soros

  Meaning Of Life, Doe, Investing

  George Soros (1994). “The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market”, p.363, John Wiley & Sons

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• Since Hollywood seems to be more interested in people wearing tights and using powers, there seems to be a fertile ground for movies about real human beings.

  Ramin Bahrani

  Real, People, Hollywood

  "99 Homes director Ramin Bahrani on his dream debate between Trump and the Pope". Interview with Charles Bramesco, www.avclub.com. October 1, 2015.

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• Irene Diamond's Fertile Ground is a provocative book. It stirs me to vigorous assent. It also triggers wide-eyed disbelief. . . . As it prods me to explosions of disagreement, it also provokes useful thought.

  Janet Lembke

  Book, Provocative, Explosions

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• The best stock a man can invest in, is the stock of a farm; the best shares are plow shares; and the best banks are the fertile banks of a rural stream; the more these are broken the better dividends they pay.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Broken, Earth

  HENRY WARD BEECHER (1859). “PLAIN AND PLEASANT TALK ABOUT Fruits, Flowers and Farming”, p.324

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• Although most people spend their entire lives following this biological impulse (i.e. the sex drive), it is only a tiny portion of our beings. . . . If we remain obsessed with seeds and eggs, we are married to the fertile reproductive valley of the Mysterious Mother but not to her immeasurable heart and all-knowing mind.

  Laozi

  Mother, Sex, Heart

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• The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.
  A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.
  It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.
  A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.
  Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches.
  In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.
  I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy
  And the visible world is all that remains.

  Czeslaw Milosz

  Country, Strong, Philosophy

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