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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Growth

The lofty oak from a small acorn grows.

Lewis Duncombe.

  • Gardener, for telling me these news of woe,
  • Pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow.
  • Shakespeare.

  • ’Tis thus the mercury of man is fix’d,
  • Strong grows the virtue with his nature mix’d.
  • Pope.

  • In a narrow circle the mind contracts.
  • Man grows with his expanded needs.
  • Schiller.

  • Our pleasures and our discontents,
  • Are rounds by which we may ascend.
  • Longfellow.

  • He builded better than he knew—
  • The conscious stone to beauty grew.
  • Emerson.

  • And so all growth that is not towards God
  • Is growing to decay.
  • George MacDonald.

  • Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch
  • At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb;
  • Keep clean, be as fruit, earn life, and watch
  • Till the white-wing’d reapers come.
  • Henry Vaughan.

  • “Ay,” quoth my uncle Gloucester,
  • “Small herb have grace, great weeds do grow apace:”
  • And since, methinks, I would not grow so fast,
  • Because sweet flowers are slow, and weeds make haste.
  • Shakespeare.

    Arts and sciences are not cast in a mould, but are found and perfected by degrees, by often handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into shape.

    Montaigne.

    Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.

    Pope.

    Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.

    Goldsmith.

  • What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up,
  • And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?
  • No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne’er forgets;
  • May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
  • Robert Browning.

  • It is not growing like a tree
  • In bulk, doth make man better be;
  • Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
  • To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
  • A lily of a day
  • Is fairer far in May,
  • Although it fall and die that night—
  • It was the plant and flower of Light.
  • Ben Jonson.

    Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye’re sleeping.

    Scott.