Ponder the fact that God has made you a gardener, to root out vice and plant virtue.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in fostering good behavior and values while eliminating negativity.
St. Catherine of Siena's quote suggests that individuals have a divine role as gardeners in their own lives, tasked with nurturing positive qualities (virtues) and eradicating negative traits (vices). This imagery of gardening serves as a metaphor for personal growth and moral development, indicating that just as a gardener tends to their plants, we must actively cultivate our character and ethics.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
When it seems that God shows us the faults of others, keep on the safer side-it may be that your judgment is false. On your lips let silence abide. And any vice that you may ascribe to others, ascribe at once to them and yourself, in true humility. If that vice really exists in a person, he will correct himself better, seeing himself so gently understood, and will say of his own accord the thing that you would have said to him.
O unfathomable depth! O Deity eternal! O deep ocean! What more could You give me than to give me Yourself?
To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.
There is no perfect virtue-none that bears fruit- unless it is exercised by means of our neighbor.
Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being.
Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind.
Neither great nor good things were ever attained without loss and hardships. Those that would reap and not labour, must faint with the wind, and perish in disappointments; but an hair of my head shall not fall, without the providence of my Father that is over all.
Because men have a history, it is difficult for them to imagine what it is like to grow up without one, or the sense of personal expansion that comes from discovering that we women have a worthy heritage. Along with pride often comes rage β rage that one has been deprived of such a significant knowledge.
The way to stop financial joyriding is to arrest the chauffeur, not the automobile.
What did you do as a child that made that hours pass like minutes? [Herein lies the key to your earthy pursuits.]
Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.
Thought precedes action, action does not always precede thought.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.