growth

For me the appropriate metaphor for the inner spiritual centre is a garden, a place of potential peace and tranquility. This garden is a place where the Spirit of God comes to make self-disclosure to share wisdom, to give affirmation or rebuke, to provide encouragement, and to give direction and guidance. When this garden is in proper order, it is a quiet place, and there is an absence of busyness, of defiling noise, of confusion. The inner garden is a delicate place, and if not properly maintained it will be quickly overrun by intrusive under-growth. God does not often walk in disordered gardens. And that is why inner gardens that are ignored are said to be empty.

True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.

True friendship is a plant of slow growth.

Everyone knows that weeds eat out the life of the garden and of the productive fields. The gardener and farmer alike each has to keep the weeding process alive. It's like that in the building and developing of character. No one knows our own faults and tendencies better than we do ourselves, so that it is up to each one of us to keep the weeds out, and to keep all growth vigorous and fruitful.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Increase of material comforts, it may generally be laid down, does not in any way conduce to moral growth.

The growth of wisdom may be gauged accurately by the decline of ill-temper.