Taste is improved by cultivation. [ Willmott ]
Cultivation is as necessary to the mind as food is to the body. [ Cicero ]
Time spent in the cultivation of the fields passes very pleasantly. [ Ovid ]
The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food supplied for the soul of man. [ Cicero ]
Nothing affords greater pleasure to the members of the family than the cultivation and daily sight of flowers. [ D. D. T. Moore ]
Folly is like the growth of weeds, always luxurious and spontaneous; wisdom, like flowers, requires cultivation. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Science keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic, but by rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. [ Tyndall ]
The cultivation of friendship with the great is pleasant to the inexperienced, but he who has experienced it dreads it. [ Horace ]
A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities. [ F. W. Robertson ]
Natural abilities can almost make up for the want of every kind of cultivation, but no cultivation for want of natural abilities. [ Arthur Schopenhauer ]
Genius is always a surprise, but it is born with great advantages when the stock from which it springs has been long under cultivation. [ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]
As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without culture, so the mind without cultivation can never produce good fruit. [ Seneca ]
Natural ability can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation; but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural ability. [ Schopenhauer ]
Among all the accomplishments of life none are so important as refinement; it is not, like beauty, a gift of Nature, and can only be acquired by cultivation and practice. [ James Ellis ]
The awakening of our best sympathies, the cultivation of our best and purest tastes, strengthening the desire to be useful and good, and directing youthful ambition to unselfish ends, - such are the objects of true education. [ J. T. Headley ]
Music is God's best gift to man, the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth that we take to heaven. But music, like all our gifts, is given us in the germ. It is for us to unfold and develop it by instruction and cultivation. [ Charles W. Landon ]
The parallel circumstances and kindred images to which we readily conform our minds are, above all other writings, to be found in the lives of particular persons, and therefore no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Whatever we may say against such collections which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem, to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of the mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant quotations." [ Goethe ]
Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]