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.
The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.
The world cares very little about what a man or woman knows; it is what the man or woman is able to do that counts.
To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.
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