Home
Our Sense of Place, Hearth, House, Domicile, Dwelling
Home Garden, Yard, Apartment, Hermitage, Cabin


Quotes for Gardeners and Lovers of the Green Way

Compiled by Karen and Mike Garofalo

Spirit of Gardening Website

 

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)


 

"Stay, stay at home, my heart, and rest;
Home-keeping hearts are happiest."
-  Henry W. Longfellow,  1807 - 1882

 

 

"Happiness grows at our own firesides,
and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens."
-   Douglas Jerrold 

 

 

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself."
-   Maya Angelou

 

 

"I do not understand how anyone can live without one small place of enchantment to turn to."
-  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings  

 

 

"Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest."
-   Robert Montgomery

 

 

"If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:
Perhaps of my planted forest a few
May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard
With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils.
Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art
To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant."

-  Robinson and Una Jeffers build a home on the Big Sur coast of California, Tor House, 1928 

 

 

"I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart."
-  Oscar Wilde    

 

 

"His native home deep imag'd in his soul."
-   Homer, The Odyssey

 

 

"You leave home to seek your fortune and, when you get it, you go home and share it with your family."
-   Anita Baker    

 

 

"I have always felt that the best security for civilization is the dwelling, and that upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends more than anything else the improvement of mankind. Such dwellings are the nursery of all domestic virtues, and without a becoming home the exercise of those virtues is impossible."
-   Benjamin Disraeli 

 

 

"Every house where love abides
And friendship is a guest,
Is surely home, and home sweet home
For there the heart can rest."
-   Henry Van Dyke  

 

 

"A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams."
-   Author Unknown  

 

 

"The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life."
-   William Ellery Channing  

 

 

"Nature is not a place to visit, it is home."   
-   Gary Snyder 

 

 

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that ...  I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature."
-   Abraham Cowley, circa 1655 

 

 

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)

 

 

"Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar."
-  Gustave Flaubert   

 

 

"Hospitality is a form of worship."
-  The Talmud    

 

 

"It is easy to embellish the pillars and insert beams in a home but hard to ge the huai tree to grow."
Yuan Yeh   

 

 

"Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home."
-   Alice Walker   

 

 

"When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock,
And the brown bee drones in the rose,
And the west is a red-streaked four-o'clock,
And summer is near its close,
It's, Oh!, For the gate, and the locust lane;
And dusk, and dew, and home again!"
-   Madison Julius Cawein, In the Lane     

 

 

"There's no place like home,
there's no place like home,
there's no place like home."
-  Frank L. Baum, The Wizard of Oz  

 

 

"You could walk out of the house, but you always returned home."
-   Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea  

 

 

"Farms and in castles, in homes, studies, and cloisters - where sensible people manage to live relatively lusty and decent lives, as moral as they must be, as free as they may be, and as masterly as they can be.  If we only knew it, this elusive arrangement is happiness."
-  Erik H. Erikson   

 

 

"Home is home, though it be homely."
-   John Clark  

 

 

 

 

"We need two homes, a green one and a brown one, a grown one and a built one, two worlds in tension."
-   Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces  

 

 

"Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other.  It is the place of confidence.  It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts.  It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule."
-   Frederick W. Robertson   

 

 

"A garden has a curious innocent way of consuming cash while all the time you are under the illusion that you are spending nothing."
-   Esther Meynell   

 

 

"There is no place more delightful than one's own fireside.
Nullus est locus domestica sede jucundior."
-   Cicero    

 

 

"The relationship between man and space is none other than dwelling, strictly thought and spoken."
-   Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking  

 

 

"Man is a peculiar creature. He spends a fortune making his home insect-proof and air-conditioned, and then eats in the yard."
-  Author Unknown   

 

 

"... a hermitage, which is about an acre of ground - an island, planted with all variety of trees, shrubs and flowers that will grow in this country, abundance of little winding walks, differently embellished with little seats and banks; in the midst is place a hermit's cell, made of the roots of trees, the floor is paved with pebbles, there is a couch made of matting, and little wooden stools, a table with a manuscript on it, a pair of spectacles, a leathern bottle; and hung up in different parts, an hourglass, a weatherglass and several mathematical instruments, a shelf of books, another of wood platters and bowls, another of earthen ones, in short everything that you might imagine necessary for a recluse."
-  Mrs. Delany, 1748  

 

 

"The sweetest type of heaven is home - nay, heaven is the home for whose acquisition we are to strive the most strongly. Home, in one form and another, is the great object of life.  It stands at the end of every day's labor, and beckons us to its bosom; an life would be cheerless and meaningless, did we not discern across the river that divides us from the life beyond, glimpses of the pleasant mansions prepared for us."
-   Josiah Gilbert Holland 

 

 

"Home is the seminary of all other institutions."
-   Edwin Hubbell Chapin  

 

 

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's sould and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.  Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way."
-   Vincent Van Gogh  

 

 

"A house is not a home."
-   Polly Adler  

 

 

"A garden is a place arranged for promenades and at the same time for the recreation of the eyes.  But it is also an accessory to the house, serving it as an accompaniment, an environment; and, within certain limits, it is simply another apartment, an annex of the house.  Therefore, how can the art which built and adorn the dwelling be refused the right to interfere in this exterior house?"
-   Vitet   

 

 

"Where is home?  Home is where the heart can laugh without shyness.  Home is where the heart's tears can dry at their own pace."
-   Vernon Baker   

 

 

"Home is the most popular, and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments."
-   Channing Pollock 

 

 

"What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"  
-  Henry David Thoreau   

 

 

"Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts."
-   Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.  

 

 

"Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room."
-   Harriet Beecher Stowe

 

 

"For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance.  Such things for example as ... the bark of a tree, the arbrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there?  What else do we need?"
-   Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire   

 

 

"We must make our homes centers of compassion and forgive endlessly." 
-  Mother Teresa   

 

 

"Home is not where you live, but where they understand you."
-   Christian Morganstern 

 

 

"Home is where the books are."
-   Richard Burton   

 

 

"In this study, we found that the more vegetation in a common space, the stronger the neighborhood social ties near that space," wrote Frances E. Kuo, William Sullivan and Liesette Brunson of the U. of I. and Rebekah Levine Coley of the University of Chicago. "Compared to residents living adjacent to relatively barren spaces, individuals living adjacent to greener common spaces had more social activities and more visitors, knew more of their neighbors, reported their neighbors were more concerned with helping and supporting one another, and had stronger feelings of belonging."

 

 

 

 

"People who live in glass houses shouldn't."
-  J. S. Singer  

 

 

"We would like only, for once, to get to where we are already." 
-   Martin Heidegger, Language  

 

 

"Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than a magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration."
-   Charles Dickens  

 

 

"The home to everyone is to him his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose."
-   Edward Coke  

 

 

"A dwelling should be not a retreat from space, but life in space."
-   L. Hoholy-Nagy, The New Vision  

 

 

Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski, 1987.  

House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of a Home by Clare Cooper Marcus, 2006. 

The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions by Winnifred Gallagher,  2007.

 

 

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." 
-  Bill Vaughan  

 

 

"Home is where you hang your head."
-   Groucho Marx  

 

 

"The little smiling cottage! where at eve
He meets his rosy children at the door,
Prattling their welcomes, and his honest wife,
With good brown cake and bacon slice, intent
To cheer his hunger after labor hard."
-   Edward Dyer 

 

 

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan, 2001. 

Spirit of Gardening Blog  

 

 

"Where thou art - that -
is Home."
-   Emily Dickinson 

 

 

"If the day ever comes when they know who
They are, they may know better where they are."
-   Robert Frost,  A Cabin in the Clearing   

 

 

"Though there are other ways to finance your gardening, one successful way is to choose carefully whom you marry.  A good and generous man is needed, one who knows how to make money and enjoys sharing it, one who himself is not interested in the actual pursuit of gardening but likes to be proud of the premises."
-   Emily Whaley,  Mrs. Whaley's Charleston Garden  

 

 

"Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition."
-  James Baldwin   

 

 

"There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never know beyond its hallowed limits."
-   Robert Southey

 

 

"The sun at home warms better than the sun elsewhere."
-   Albanian proverb  

 

 

"Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities."
-   Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild   

 

 

"For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium [and one's home is the safest refuge to everyone]."
-   Edward Coke, Third Institute    

 

 

"It is easier to pull down than to build up."
-   Latin Proverb    

 

 

"Peace and rest at length have come,
All the day's long toil is past;
And each heart is whispering, "Home,
Home at last!"
-  Thomas Hood, Home at Last 

 

 

"Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to."
-   John Ed Pearce 

 

 

"Home is home be it ever so humble."
-   Proverb  

 

 

"Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth.  He ought to give himself up to a 
particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it."
-   N. Scott Momaday

 

 

Red Bluff, California, Notebooks of Karen and Mike Garofalo    

Spirit of Gardening  

Green Way Blog 

Nature Spirits of Home and Hearth 

 

 

"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
-  Confucius   

 

 

"The spirit and tone of your home will have great influence on your children. If it is what it ought to be, it will fasten conviction on their minds, however wicked they may become."
-   Richard Cecil    

 

 

"Stint yourself, as you think good, in other things; but don't scruple freedom in brightening home. Gay furniture and a brilliant garden are a sight day by day, and make life blither."
-   Charles Buxton           

 

 

"Knowing where and who are intimately linked."
-   Gary Snyder, Re-Inhabitation  

 

 

"If delight may provoke men's labour, what greater delights is there then to behold the earth as apparelled with plants, as with a robe of imbroidered worke, set with orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels?  The delight is great but the use greater, and joyned often with necessitie."  
-   John Gerarde   

 

 

"A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless." 
-   May Sarton  

 

 

"I have been very happy with my homes, but homes really are no more than the people who live in them."
-   Nancy Reagan  

 

 

"If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of heaven." 
-   Charles Dickens

 

 

"When men do not love their hearth, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both ... Our God is a house-hold God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling."
-   John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1908  

 

 

"To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."
-   Robert Burns  

 

 

"Home is the most popular, and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments."   
-   Channing Pollock  

 

 

"A physician can bury his mistakes, an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." 
-   Frank Lloyd Wright  

 

 

"No matter under what circumstances you leave it, home does not cease to be home.  No matter how you lived there - well or poorly."
-   Joseph Brodsky  

 

 

"My whinstone house my castle is,
 I have my own four walls."
-   Thomas Carlyle  

 

 

The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions by Winnifred Gallagher,  2007.

Rustic Retreats: A Build-It-Yourself Guide by David and Jeanie Stiles, 1998.

 

 

"There's a strange something, which without a brain
Fools feel, and which e'en wise men can't explain,
Planted in man, to bind him to that earth,
In dearest ties, from whence he drew his birth."
-   Charles Churchill  

 

 

"Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life."
-   Timothy Titcomb 

 

 

 

"To dwell means to belong to a given place."
-   Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling   

 

 

"The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers."
-   Honore de Balzac   

 

 

"This cabin, Mary, in my sight appears,
Built as it has been in our waning years,
A rest afforded to our weary feet,
Preliminary to - the last retreat."
-  William Cowper, 1793
  
An inscription for the small cabin, a Hermitage, in the author's garden   

 

 

Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World by Edward Casey, 1993.  

Green Living Home   

Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being by Ester M. Sternberg, M.D., 2010.

 

 

"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
-   George Moore   

 

 

"To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home."
-   Hal Borland  

 

 

"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort."
-   Jane Austen  

 

 

"The impulse for much writing is homesickness.  You are trying to get back home, and in your writing you are invoking that home, so you are assuaging the homesickness."    
-   Joan Didion   

 

 

"Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse."
-   George Bernard Shaw

 

 

"Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in."   
-   Robert Frost   

 

 

"He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."
-  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

 

"Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something
comes into its own and flourishes."
-   Martin Heidegger  

 

 

"Even in the stifling bosom of the town,
A garden, in which nothing thrives, has charms
That soothes the rich possessor; much consol'd,
That here and there some sprigs of mournful mint,
Or nightshade, or valerian, grace the well
He cultivates."

-  William Cowper, The Task, 1785  

 

 

"Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved."
-   Ann Douglas

 

 

"A house is a machine for living in."
-   Le Corbursier. Towards a New Architecture   

 

 

"There is no sanctuary of virtue like a home."
-   Edward Everett  

 

 

"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home."
-   Matsuo Basho

 

 

"Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place."
-   Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild   

 

 

Chop Wood Carry Water: A Guide to Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in Everyday Life edited by Rick Fields, 1984. 

The Gentle Path of Spiritual Progress by Hua-Ching Ni, 1987.  

Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, 500 BCE. 

Lifestyle Advice for Wise Persons compiled by Mike Garofalo, 2011. 

One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp, 2011.

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle, 2004. 

The Solitary Druid: A Practitioner's Guide by Robert Lee Skip Ellison, 2005. 

Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks by Gary Thorp, 2001. 

The Tao of Daily Life by Derek Lin, 2007. 

 

 

"Are you not surprised to find how independent of money peace of conscience is, and how much happiness can be condensed in the humblest home?"
-   James Hamilton 

 

 

"The paternal hearth, the rallying-place of the affections."
-   Washington Irving  

 

 

"One's home is like a delicious piece of pie you order in a restaurant on a country road one cozy evening - the best piece of pie you have ever eaten in your life - and can never find again.  After you leave home, you may find yourself feeling homesick, even if you have a new home that has nicer wallpaper and a more efficient dishwasher than the home in which you grew up." 
-   Lemony Snicket  

 

 

Rustic Retreats: A Build-It-Yourself Guide by David and Jeanie Stiles, 1998.

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan, 2001. 

 

 

"Peace and a well-built house cannot be bought too dearly."
-   Danish proverb   

 

 

""Peace" - that was the other name for home."
-   Kathleen Norris   

 

 

"This fond attachment to the well-known place
 Whence first we started into life's long race,
 Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway,
 We feel it e'en in age, and at our latest day."
-   William Cowper 

 

 

Outside the Not So Big House: Creating the Landscape of Home by Julie Moir Messervy and Sarah Susanka, 2006.  

Paths of Desire: The Story of a Suburban Gardener by Dominique Browning, 2005.

 

 

"Every one in his own house and God in all of them."
-   Cervantes  

 

 

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive at where we started
And know the place for the first time." 
-   T. S. Eliot,  Little Gidding  

 

 

"Home ought to be our clearinghouse, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life."
-   Kathleen Norris  

 

 

"Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other."
-   Josiah Gilbert Holland  

 

 

"To feel at home, stay at home."
-   Clifton Fadiman   

 

 

"Home should be an oratorio of the memory, singing to all our after life melodies and harmonies of old-remembered joy."
-   Henry Ward Beecher      

 

 

How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants that Purify Your Home or Office by B. C. Wolverton, 1997. 

Indoor Plants: The Essential Guide to Choosing and Caring for Houseplants by Grahame Clarke, 1997. 

 

 

"Nature comes home to one most when he is at home; the stranger and traveler finds her a stranger and traveler also.  One's own landscape comes in time to be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mar those hills, and he suffers.  How has the farmer planted himself in his fields; builded himself into his
stone walls, and evoked the sympathy of the hills by his struggle!  This home feeling, this domestication of nature, is important to the observer.  This is the birdlime with which he catches the bird; this is the private door that admits him behind the scenes."
-   John Burroughs,  1837 - 1921   

 

 

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."
-  Herman Melville, Moby Dick   

 

 

"When your safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you whish you were safe at home."
-   Thornton Wilder 

 

 

"You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right."
-   Maya Angelou  

 

 

"I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world." 
-   George Washington   

 

 

Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski, 1987.

House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of a Home by Clare Cooper Marcus, 2006. 

 

 

"Home - the nursery of the Infinite."
-   William Ellery Channing

 

 

"The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure.  It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks."    
-   Gilbert K. Chesterton   

 

 

"It was the policy of the good old gentleman to make his children feel that home was the happiest place in the world; and I value this delicious home-feeling as one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow."
-   Washington Irving 

 

 

"A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.  For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.  If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish."
-   Margaret Fuller Ossoli  

 

 

Green Living Home

Green Way Blog

Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being by Ester M. Sternberg, M.D., 2010.

 

 

"There is no happiness in life, there is no misery, like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home."
-   Edwin Hubbell Chapin  

 

 

"At night returning, every labour sped,
He sits him down, the monarch of a shed;
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze;
While his lov'd partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board."
-   Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller 

 

 

"The light is what guides you home, the warmth is what keeps you there."
-   Ellie Rodriguez    

 

 

"Unless you move, the place where you are is the place where you will always be."
-   Ashleigh Brilliant   

 

 

"For a man's house is his castle."
-   Edward Coke, Institutes 

 

 

"Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter."
-   Madison Julius Cawein, Old Homes

 

 

The Complete Houseplant Survival Manual by Barbara Pleasant, 2005

Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World by Edward Casey, 1993.

 

 

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition; the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution."
-   Samuel Johnson  

 

 

"At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddling, stacher thro'
To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee."
-   Robert Burns, The Cotter's Saturday Night 

 

 

"Home and heaven are not so far separated as we sometimes think.  Nay, they are not separated at all, for they are both in the same great building.  Home is the lower story, and is located down here on the ground floor; heaven is above stairs, in the second and third stories; and, as one after another the family is called to come up higher, that which seemed to be such a strange place begins to wear a familiar aspect; and, when at last not one is left below, the home is transferred to heaven, and heaven is home."
-   Alexander Dickson 

 

 

"To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise."
-   Augustus William Hare 

 

 

flow2.gif (27433 bytes)  

 

 

The Spirit of Gardening Website

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and Insights
Arranged by Over 250 Topics
Over 15 Megabytes of Text
Over 20 Million Webpages (excluding graphics) Served to Readers Around the World
       From January 1, 1999 through December 31, 2010
Compiled by Karen Garofalo and Mike Garofalo from Red Bluff, California
E-Mail

February 18, 2011

Green Way Research

Spirit of Gardening Blog