Garden Stones With Quotes & Sayings

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

- The Garden of Love — William Blake

I asked, can work and leisure and relationships and eating and lovemaking and ministry all really flow from a single passion? Is there something deep enough and big enough and strong enough to hold all that together? Can sex and cars and work and war, and changing diapers and doing taxes really have a God exalting, soul satisfying unity? Now we see that every experience in life is designed to magnify the cross of Christ. Or to say it another way, every good thing in life (or bad thing graciously turned for good) is meant to magnify Christ and Him crucified.
Not to aim to show God is not to love, because God is what we need most deeply ... If you don't point people to God for everlasting joy, you don't love. You waste your life. — John Piper

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. — Mirabel Osler

Leave no stone unturned in your quest to disrupt a rock garden. — Demetri Martin

Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world. — Brenna Yovanoff

Amends

Regret lingers, niggles. Yellow lilies
on the table, gone brown in the vase.
The garden we talk about, endlessly,
but never begin, deterred by tough sod.

On the edge of the walk, the wheelbarrow
full of stones waits like an undelivered
apology. Within, the floor needs scrubbing
and only hands and knees will do the job.

I know that forgiveness is a simple meal -
a salad, a boiled potato, a glass of tea.
Easy to prepare, to offer. That the silence
afterward will satisfy, perhaps even nourish. — Antonia Clark

Though there may be others out there with problems bigger, that doesn't make yours any smaller. — Megan Linski

From the Garden"

Come, my beloved,
consider the lilies.
We are of little faith.
We talk too much.
Put your mouthful of words away
and come with me to watch
the lilies open in such a field,
growing there like yachts,
slowly steering their petals
without nurses or clocks.
Let us consider the view:
a house where white clouds
decorate the muddy halls.
Oh, put away your good words
and your bad words. Spit out
your words like stones!
Come here! Come here!
Come eat my pleasant fruits. — Anne Sexton

Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). — Elizabeth Gilbert

Her laughter catches him off guard. As if it's carbonated and someone has poured it too fast and it's bubbling over in all directions. It doesn't fit at all with the gray cement and right-angled garden paving stones. It's an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions. — Fredrik Backman

[T]he distance Boston drivers generally maintain from the car in front of them is visible only with a good microscope. — Dan Ariely

Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions, and gifts, our human needs and eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for. — Eugene H. Peterson

It was Heraclitus, of course, who came up with the formulation that we are never able to step into the same river twice. ... The obverse of Heraclitus's maxim may be that one is never able to step out of the river the same, twice. A neuron in the brain is altered with every experience. The self, if it exists, must be a constantly evolving thing. Those coming to the banks of the Ganges or Jordan to immerse themselves do not expect to leave the same as they arrive. — James Attlee

You don't have to do everything by the time you're 30. Or 40. All you need is a work ethic. It's what allows you to push through moments of disappointment and self-doubt and fear. — Candace Bushnell

The Garden of Love
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires. — William Blake

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air. — Theodore Roethke

Do not focus your thoughts among the confused wheels of secondary causes, as -'O if this had been, this had not followed!' Look up to the master motion of the first wheel. In building, we see hewn stones and timbers under hammers and axes, yet the house in this beauty we do not see at the present, but it is in the mind of this builder. We also see unbroken clods, furrows, and stones, but we do not see the summer lilies, roses, and the beauty of a garden. Even so we do not presently see the outcome of God's decrees with his blessed purpose. It is hard to believe when his purpose is hidden and under the ground. Providence has a thousand keys to deliver his own even when all hope is gone. Let us be faithful and care for our own part, which is to do and suffer for him, and lay Christ's part on himself and leave it there; duties are ours, events are the Lord's. — Samuel Rutherford

Lily studied the rock garden. On a long, low hill that sloped to the stream, someone had set stones into the side and planted wildflowers in the pockets of dirt above them. They made her think of opera boxes filled with ladies in colorful gowns. Tyler's mother must have loved cool tones. Lily admired the blues, purples and pinks of the different flowers... — Debra Holland

There are few gardens that can be left alone. A few years of neglect and only the skeleton of a garden can be traced ... Japanese artists working with a few stones and sand four hundred years ago achieved strangely lasting compositions. However there, too, but for the hands that have piously raked the white sand into patterns and controlled the spread of moss and lichens, little would remain. — Russell Page

No two people ever view the world from exactly the same perspective, understand things the same way, human or not. The best we can ever do is try. — Debra Driza

I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naive candour of a child. — Claude Debussy

And what is sin?' said Cotgrave.
'I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
'Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is. — Arthur Machen

It's like Finding Nemo." ( Constantine)
"How the hell is this anything like Finding Nemo? If anything it's like Mission Impossible."(Alexon)
"I have never seen this Impossible Mission and Nemo is cute." (Constantine) — Rosetta M. Overman

I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity. — Jean-Paul Sartre

She plucked a rose and held it to her face. She hated the way roses smelled, their sweetness too fragile. She wanted a garden of evergreens. A garden of stones. A garden of swords. — Kiersten White

The art of stone in a Japanese garden is that of placement. Its ideal does not deviate from that of nature. — Isamu Noguchi

Healing fails to occur because it is much easier to injure another than to heal oneself. — Vernon Howard

In a forest of stars and boughs, here is your face. In the garden, in the shipwreck, in sacred stones, in figs and roses. Through long nights of walking, what does not sing for us? — Anne Michaels

I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds ... But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them. — Richard Aldington

Mindless Christianity is no Christianity at all. You can't love what you don't know. — R.C. Sproul

We've decided to wake a miss for you because you are nice. We want a booby as roomful as ours.
Everybody had seen the Hobgoblin laugh, but nobody believed he could smile. He was so happy that you could see it all over him
from his hat to his boots! Without a word he waved his cloak over the grass
and behold! Once more the garden was filled with a pink light and there on the grass before them lay a twin to the King's Ruby
the Queen's Ruby. — Tove Jansson

Human beings, for some reason or another, like symmetry. You leave a bunch of them next to a jungle for a couple of days and you'll come back to find an ornamental garden. We take stones and turn them into the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral. — Mark Forsyth

Perhaps it is because my conviction is anyone may believe whatever they wish. Intolerance is a greater offense against God than holding a strange or even inconsistent belief. You have the right to worship what you wish - a pile of stones in your garden - as long as you do not injure others. — Anne Perry

Things that seem too common: too many furnishings where one is sitting; too many brushes around an inkstone; too many Buddhas in a home chapel; too many stones and trees and bushes in a garden courtyard; too many children and grandchildren in a house; too many words used when talking to people; too much praise for oneself in a written petition.
Things that don't offend good taste even if numerous: books ... — Yoshida Kenko

No such thing as a Dixiecrat. — H. Rap Brown

Steven and I stood on the stage at the Boston Garden after the Stones had just played there and the stage was still up. We had been playing cards, maybe a high-school dance, to 400 or 500, maybe a thousand. We just stood on the stage and thought, 'Well,man,maybe someday.' In 4 years that was OUR stage. — Joe Perry

I believe in trusting. Trust begets trust. Suspicion is foetid and only stinks. He who trusts has never yet lost in the world. — Mahatma Gandhi

This is the rock garden.
In it, the stones
too are flowers — Margaret Atwood