A mind once cultivated will not lie fallow for half an hour. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
Countries are well cultivated, not as they are fertile, but as they are free. [ Montesquieu ]
A well-cultivated mind is, so to say, made up of all the minds of the centuries preceding. [ Fontenelle ]
Reason developed and cultivated will always be the most powerful curb to the passions: this is the compass of all mankind. [ J. J. Rousseau ]
Without earnestness there is nothing to be done in life; yet among the people we name cultivated, little earnestness is to be found. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins. [ Isaac Disraeli ]
Natural liberty is the right of common upon a waste: civil liberty is the safe, exclusive, unmolested enjoyment of a cultivated enclosure. [ Paley ]
Artists may produce excellent designs, but they will avail little, unless the taste of the public is sufficiently cultivated to appreciate them. [ George C. Mason ]
What gems of painting or statuary are in the world of art, or what flowers are in the world of nature, are gems of thought to the cultivated and thinking. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
A well-cultivated mind is, so to speak, made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only one single mind which has been educated during all this time. [ Fontenelle ]
We content ourselves to present to thinking minds the original seeds from whence spring vast fields of new thought, that may be further cultivated, beautified, and enlarged. [ Chevalier Ramsay ]
Music, if only listened to, and not scientifically cultivated, gives too much play to the feelings and fancy; the difficulties of the art draw forth the whole energies of the soul. [ Richter ]
If there be one thing on earth which is truly admirable, it is to see God's wisdom blessing an inferiority of natural powers, where they have been honestly, truly, and zealously cultivated. [ Dr. Arnold ]
The mind has a certain vegetative power, which cannot be wholly idle. If it is not laid out and cultivated into a beautiful garden, it will of itself shoot up in weeds or flowers of a wild growth. [ Steele ]
That mere will and industry can enable any man to accomplish anything is a belief common enough amongst imperfectly educated man. But no one of really cultivated intellect denies the variety of natural endowments. [ Hamerton ]
As the mind of Johnson was robust, but neither nimble nor graceful, so his style was void of all grace and ease, and, being the most unlike of all styles to the natural effusion of a cultivated mind, had the least pretension to the praise of eloquence. [ Sir J. Mackintosh ]
To behold, is not necessary to observe, and the power of comparing and combining is only to be obtained by education. It is much to be regretted that habits of exact observation are not cultivated in our schools; to this deficiency may be traced much of the fallacious reasoning, the false philosophy which prevails. [ Humboldt ]
Wise, cultivated, genial conversation is the best flower of civilisation, and the best result which life has to offer us--a cup for gods, which has no repentance. Conversation is our account of ourselves. All we have, all we can, all we know is brought into play, and as the reproduction, in finer form, of all our havings. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Music has certainly a powerful influence on the passions, and produces happy effects upon the human heart and mind when cultivated moderately; but when it becomes the general prevailing passion of a nation, or, as it were, gets dominion over them, it unquestionably produces not effeminacy merely, but a hateful depravity of manners. [ S. F. Bradford ]
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]