"Half the interest of a garden is the constant
exercise of the imagination. You are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. I believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. To be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal."
- Alice Morse Earle, 1897
"Any activity becomes creative when
the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better."
- John Updike
"Making the simple complex is commonplace;
making the complicated simple,
awesomely simple, that's creativity."
- Charles Mingus
"Each garden has its own surprise."
- Susan Allen Toth
"Creativity is allowing
oneself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep."
- Scott Adams
"The very essence of the creative is
its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it."
- Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person
"Gardening has compensations out of
all proportions to its goals.
It is creation in the pure sense."
- Phyllis McGinley
"I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person."
- Martha Gellhorn
"Creative minds have always been known
to survive any kind of bad training."
- Anna Freud
"The secret to creativity is knowing
how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein
"All gardeners need to know when to
accept something wonderful
and unexpected, taking no credit except for letting it be."
- Allen Lacy
"Don't underestimate the therapeutic value of
gardening. It's the one area where
we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of
art.
Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from
nature,
has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of beauty
and a joy for ever."
- Geoff Hamilton, Paradise Gardens
"To be open to inspiration, one must
cultivate a leaning for the
problematic, a chronic attraction to things that do not totally fit,
agree, or make sense. Inspired ideas are less often solutions to old
problems than newly discovered or totally reformulated problems --
problems 'created' like brilliant works of art."
- Robert Grudin
"Because a garden mean constantly
making choices,
it offers almost limitless possibilities for surprise and satisfaction."
- Jane Garmey, The Writer in the Garden
"A garden recreates itself daily; we seldom step in the
same garden thrice.
God may have created the first garden, but,
typical of him,
he got bored with trying to keep it up and make it better.
Many pursue happiness, gardeners create
it.
Weeding one part of the garden
creates a compost pile in another.
Gardens are not inherently
meaningful in many ways; but, making a garden
and caring
for it creates meaningfulness.
Don't grow delusions from a
playful imagination."
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
"The ultimate inspiration is the
deadline."
- Steve Karmen
"Consistency is the last refuge
of the unimaginative."
- Oscar Wilde
"In creating, the only hard thing's to
begin;
a grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak."
- James Russell Lowell
"If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because
he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Don't underestimate the therapeutic
value of gardening. It's the one area where we can all use our nascent creative talents to make a truly satisfying work of art. Every individual, with thought, patience and a large portion of help from nature, has it in them to create their own private paradise: truly a thing of beauty and a joy for ever."
- Geoff Hamilton, Paradise Gardens
"Mistakes are the portals of
discovery."
- James Joyce
"Creativity is so delicate a flower
that praise tends to make it bloom,
while discouragement often nips it in the bud."
- Author Unknown
"In all things of nature there is something marvelous."
- Aristotle
"One of the advantages
of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries."
- A. A. Milne
"In the garden of my
life
I'm done with anger, done with strife.
I cultivate my own few joys
far from this culture's buzzing noise.
Colonnade and
marketplace,
fame's small change and money's race,
academe's cold haughty tower --
have no meaning, hold no power.
Letting go of shoulds
and oughts,
I concentrate on greener thoughts
and find as I fulfill my soul
that things spin calmly in control,
that though events conspire still,
they tend to bend towards my will.
No greater cause achieves the measure
than that of my own reasoned pleasure."
- Peter Saint-Andre,
In the Garden
Creativity is our true
nature; blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a
process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming
of a flower at the end of a slender green stem.
- Julia Cameron
If your garden was there before you were,
chances are it grew out of many other's dreams.
- Ferris Cook
Links and References
Aha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas. By Jordan Ayan. Rick Benzel, Editor. New York, Crown Trade Paperbacks, 1997. 287 pages. Index. ISBN: 0-517-88400-3.
Jump Start Your Brain. By Doug Hall. Retired Master
Marketing Inventor, Procter & Gamble, and creator of the Eureka! Stimulus Response
Method with David Wecker. New York, Warner Books, 1995. 418 pages.
ISBN: 0-446-51717-8.
Shaving the Inside of Your Skull. A User's guide to
Psyche, Self and Transformation. Crazy Wisdom for Discovering Who You Really Are.
By Mel Ash. New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher, G. P. Putnam, 1996.
215 pages.
More Quotes
for
Gardeners
Spirituality and Concerns of the Soul
Simplicity
and the Simple Life
Pulling Onions
Quips and Observations from Michael P.
Garofalo
Haiku Poetry - Links and References
Clichés for Gardeners and Farmers
The History of Gardening
Timeline
From Ancient Times to the 20th Century
Quotes
for Gardeners
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips,
Clichés, Adages, Wisdom
A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by 130 Topics
Many of the Documents Include Recommended Readings and Internet Links.
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Distributed on the Internet by Michael P. Garofalo
A Short Biography of Mike Garofalo
Ways to Communicate with Mike
Red Bluff, California
Creativity - Garden Digest: Version
4.7
The History of Gardening Timeline
Cloud Hands: Taijiquan and Qigong