A Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I go into the garden with a spade and dig a bed I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
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You plant a garden one flower at a time. ... You write a book one word at a time, clean a closet one shelf at a time, run a marathon one step at a time. If you feel defeated by some large task, get your spade and dig the first hole.
When I see a spade, I call it a spade. I'm glad to say I have never seen a spade. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use it. It's the only thing he's fit for.
The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.
In New York, we have laws against defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.
Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this business of letting go - letting go of the children God gives to us for such a brief time before they go off on their own; letting go of old homes, old friends, old places and old dreams.
Inside every one of us is a garden, and every practitioner has to go back to their garden and take care of it. Maybe in the past, you left in untended for a long time. You should know exactly what is going on in your own garden, and try to put everything in order. Restore the beauty; restore the harmony in your garden. If it is well tended, many people will enjoy your garden.
To dig one's own spade into one's own earth! Has life anything better to offer than this?
It is no use asking me or anyone else how to dig... Better to go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it.
It seems so much of my time and my energy have been focused on making or trying to make other people love me. The unspoken belief was that if I could make myself lovable to others I would feel loved....The truth is, I can only feel loved by others when I love myself.
Needing to talk badly about others indicates low self esteem. That means, 'I feel so low that instead of picking myself up, I have to cut others down.' Letting go of negative things quickly is healthy.
All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, my numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn't go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.
I support Alice Waters in her desire that there be a vegetable garden at the White House. I don't think they should rip up the Rose Garden, because that's something that I love. They should probably dig up another patch and grow some vegetables there.
I had been in a place where I was letting too many people dictate who I should be and what I should be, and I was trying to make everybody happy to the point where it was just killing me. I'd completely lost myself. It's kind of funny now that people think I've completely changed myself for Marilyn Manson, when this is actually the first time in my life that I took a stand and said, "This is who I am and this is who I've always wanted to be, and I'm finally with somebody who lets me be who I want to be."
But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'
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