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Think of your life as a garden that you’re assigned that is yours to transform

• We’re all assigned a piece of garden, a corner of the universe that is ours to transform. Our corner of the universe is our own life – our relationships, our homes, our work, our current circumstances– exactly as they are.  Every situation we find ourselves in is an opportunity, perfectly planned by the Holy Spirit, to teach love instead of fear.  Marianne Williamson
• Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path. Jean Anouilh
• Gardening,  Learning,  Growth

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Fertilise your garden with love and compassion …

• If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow. Elisabeth Kuebler-  Ross
• We are all here to serve in our own unique ways and to give back to the earth and to life what we have been given. We are here to contribute the one thing that makes us immortal:    We cannot hold on to the tree of life forever and we cannot live forever through our actions.  But if we act out of love, the sacrifices we perform will sustain those who come after us, and our garden will have many beautiful trees.  When we each make the choice to serve, no one will suffer because of someone else’s desires.  No tree will go without nourishment or be cut down to fulfill someone else’s wants.  Our garden will flourish because each seed will have rich soil and each leaf will be free to display its beautiful colours for all to see.  It will be an awesome garden that will make the front page of every newspaper.  Bernie Siegel
• When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.   Thich Nhat Hanh
• Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. Jim Rohn
• When we are in a truly loving relationship, we receive the gift of being known and accepted. We become more, not less, of who we are. We receive the space in which to bloom. This is how we know we are in a loving relationship. We are blooming, and the one we love is blooming as well. Brenda Shoshanna
• Love,  Compassion

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… for love causes all things to bloom

• When you plant a seed of love, it is you that blossoms. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
• Love is the flower of life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. H. Lawerence
• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring. Oscar Wilde
• Flowers

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Fertilise your garden with attention and care

• Attention is like sunlight and water for a plant. What we pay attention to will grow. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. Jackson Brown
• Attention

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Fertilise your garden with understanding

• To know someone here or there with whom you feel there is understanding in spite of differences or thoughts expressed- – that can make of this earth a garden.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Understanding

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Water your garden with trust, hope and acceptance

• Before anything can be planted, the soil must be ready. We must allow the softening mulch of God’s forgiveness to give air and breath to the soil of our hearts.  Prejudices—taught in our childhood or imposed by our society—must be released.  Fear must be replaced by trust, and suspicion by childlike hope and acceptance.  These changes in the soil will not come easily or without sweat, but any good gardener knows that preparing the soil is the most important of all labors.  It gives the seeds a chance to grow and eventually, to exhibit all that is hidden in its complex genetic structure.  Peggy Benson
• Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection. John Powell
• Trust,  Hope,  Acceptance

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Gratitude and generosity will also increase the harvest

• The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest. William Blake
• Care less for your harvest than for how it is shared and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace. Kent Nerburn
• We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest. Orison Swett Marden
• You must give to get, you must sow the seed, before you can reap the harvest. Scott Reed
• Gratitude,  Generosity,  Giving

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Cultivate your relationships like a garden and be grateful for the gardeners

• Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing. Jim Rohn
• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy — they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.  Marcel Proust
• Principles for healthy relationships

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Think of yourself as a flower in the garden of life

• We are all flowers in the Great Spirit’s garden. We share a common root, and the root is Mother Earth.  The garden is beautiful because it has different colors in it, and those colors represent different traditions and cultural backgrounds.  David Monongye
• All of us, children and adults, are beautiful flowers. Our eyelids are exactly like rose petals, especially when our eyes are closed. Our ears are like morning glories listening to the sounds of birds.  Our lips form a beautiful flower every time we smile.  And our two hands are a lotus flower with five petals.  The practice is to keep our “flowerness” alive and present, not just for our own benefit but for the happiness of everyone.  Thich Nhat Hanh
• Flowers

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Kind thoughts, contentment, peace and joy are the flowers of life

• Yes, in the poor man’s garden grow far more than herbs or flowers– kind thoughts, contentment, peace of mind, and joy for weary hours. Mary Howitt
• The comfortable and comforting people are those who look upon the bright side of life; gathering its roses and sunshine and making the most that happens seem the best. Dorothy Dix
• Contentment,  Inner peace,  Joy

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We are all in the business of gardening for the future

• Life is a garden. It is an opportunity. You can grow weeds, you can grow roses; it all depends on you. Osho
• We are always in the business of gardening for the future. Geshe Michael Roach
• Without a seed, there will be no plant. Geshe Rabten
• The future

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Make of your heart and soul a garden…

• May our heart’s garden of awakening bloom with hundreds of flowers. Thich Nhat Hanh
• A kind soul is in constant bloom. S. Williams
• There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul’s garden, which I love to have watered once a week. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
• Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. Marcel Proust
• Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. May Sarton
• Gardening

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… by planting seeds of love and compassion

• The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there? Jack Kornfield
• Every leaf that grows will tell you: what you sow will bear fruit, so if you have any sense my friend, don’t plant anything but Love. Rumi
• An ordinary favour we do for someone or any compassionate reaching out may seem to be going nowhere at first, but may be planting a seed we can’t see right now. Sometimes we need to just do the best we can and then trust in an unfolding we can’t design or ordain. Sharon Salzberg
• The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul. John Welwood
• Love,  Compassion

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Plant seeds of desire

• Plant the seed of desire in your mind and it forms a nucleus with power to attract to itself everything needed for its fulfilment. Robert Collier
• The first principle of success is desire – knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed. Robert Collier
• Desire

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To reap a harvest in the future, you need to plant seeds today…

• The only thing that endures over time is the ‘Law of the Farm.’ You must prepare the ground, plant the seed, cultivate, and water if you expect to reap the harvest. Stephen Covey
• I grew up on a farm. We learned that there was a season to plant, a season to water, and season to harvest. The planting and watering could be laborious, but without those stages, there would never be a harvest. John Wooden
• What you do today can improve all of your tomorrows. Marc and Angel Chernoff
• It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses. George Eliot
• Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow — perhaps it all will. Albert Einstein
• Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later. Og Mandino
• Before the reward there must be labour. You plant before you harvest. You sow in tears before you reap joy. Ralph Ransom
• It is like the seed put in the soil – the more one sows, the greater the harvest. Orison Swett Marden
• It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn. C. Forbes
• Our deeds are seed of fate, sown here on earth, but bringing forth their harvest in eternity. George Dana Boardman
• Plant the seeds of your dreams and weed all the objections out. Mary Anne Radmacher

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… for all the flowers of tomorrow are in the seeds of today

• The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today. Proverb

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If you’re not happy with your current crop, plant a new crop

• If you are not happy with your current ‘crop,’ it is up to you, starting today, to plant a new crop, to begin doing more of those things that lead to success—and to stop engaging in those activities that lead nowhere. T. Harv Eker

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Judge each day by the seeds you plant

• Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. Robert Louis Stevenson
• In every forest, on every farm, in every orchard on earth, it’s what’s under the ground that creates what’s above the ground. That’s why placing your attention on the fruits that you have already grown is futile. You cannot change the fruits that are already hanging on the tree. You can, however, change tomorrow’s fruits. But to do so, you will have to dig below the ground and strengthen the roots. T. Harv Eker

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Realise that with your every deed, you sow a seed

• The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny. James Allen
• With every deed, you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see. Ella Wheeler Wilcox
• One person can completely change the character of a country, and the industry of its people, by dropping a single seed in fertile soil. John C. Gifford

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You also sow seeds with your thoughts

• You are now in the additional business of mental gardening: choosing the seeds or imprints you want to put in your mind by studying which imprints create the things you want to achieve—consciously planting those seeds, and then sitting back to enjoy the extraordinary success that will come to you. Geshe Michael Roach
• Every thought-seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own fruitage of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit, bad thoughts bad fruit. James Allen
• My mind is a garden. My thoughts are the seeds. My harvest will be either flower or weeds. Mel Weldon
• Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don’t count on harvesting Golden Delicious. Bill Meyer
• Thinking

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Nourish the seeds you plant…

• Attention is like sunlight and water for a plant. What we pay attention to will grow. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with the hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so you must attend to and nourish the garden of your becoming. Jean Houston

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… but be sure you water them with optimism, not fear

• Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream. Lao Tzu
• Talk unbelief, and you will have unbelief; but talk faith, and you will have faith. According to the seed sown will be the harvest. Ellen G. White
• Optimism,  Fear

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Always make sure you’re sowing the right seeds

• Plant seeds of happiness, hope, success, and love; it will all come back to you in abundance. This is the law of nature. Steve Maraboli
• Nature herself does not distinguish between what seed it receives. It grows whatever seed is planted; this is the way life works. Be mindful of the seeds you plant today, as they will become the crop you harvest. Mary Morrissey
• Our minds work like a garden. It is fertile ground that accepts any and everything we plant. Good or evil, constructive or destructive, our lives will bear the fruit of the seeds we plant in our minds. Ivanla Vanzant
• Happiness is something we reap from the seeds we sow. Plant misery seeds and that is what you reap. Stephen Richards

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When you sow a seed, it takes some time for the results to be noticeable

• Everything has a gestation period, a time period that must pass before things will come into form. If you plant a carrot seed, it takes about seven weeks for the sprout to make its above- dirt entrance. Bamboo, which can grow up to thirteen feet in as little as one week, takes up to seven years to break through the surface of the ground. But for seven long years it looks like absolutely nothing’s happening. Now that takes some commitment. James Arthur Ray
• Imprints works the same as plants, don’t doubt it. Nobody would plant some flower seeds in their garden on Monday, and then stand in the garden all day on Tuesday waiting for their flowers, angry and disappointed when they failed to appear by evening. Geshe Michael Roach
• Patience

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The same applies to personal growth…

• Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud. George Eliot
• Growth

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… for all great things grow in their own time

• No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. Epictetus
• Just like the butterfly, I too will awaken in my own time. Deborah Chaskin
• The seasons do not push one another; neither do clouds race the wind across the sky. All things happen in their own good time. Dan Millman

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Your job is to create the perfect conditions for growth – and then to trust the process patiently

• We plant, water, and weed the seeds of creativity, but we don’t have the power to make them grow, let alone grow according to our schedule. How it all unfolds is up to God. God’s wisdom will fulfil our deepest intentions once we set them in motion. Our part is to create the perfect conditions for the Universe to flow through us—much like our job is to create the perfect conditions for the garden to grow—but that’s all we can do. God flows through us and develops our gardens according to his own timetable. And thank goodness for that, because God knows and grows better than we do. Sonia Choquette
• The farmer has patience and trusts the process. He just has the faith and deep understanding that through his daily efforts, the harvest will come. And then one day, almost out of nowhere, it does. Robin S. Sharma
• Patience

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Cultivate the garden of the mind

• As an orchard when manured produces pleasant trees and luscious fruit, so does a cultivated mind produce pure thoughts and noble actions. William Scott Downey
• Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• The cultivation of the mind is a kind of food supplied for the soul of man. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind. Katherine Mansfield
• The mind is nothing less than a garden of inestimable value which man should strive to cultivate. William Scott Downey
• The mind

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Weeding out negative thoughts and emotions from the mind

• A person’s character and their garden both reflect the amount of weeding that was done during the growing season.
• A person’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed- seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind. Just as gardeners cultivate their plots, keeping them free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which they require, so may a person tend the garden of his or her mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.  By pursuing this process, a person sooner or later discovers that he or she is the master- gardener of his or her soul, the director of his or her life. James Allen
• A well-kept garden filled with flowers has no room left for weeds to share; the mind keeps out unworthy thoughts when loveliness is dwelling there. Leona Bold Martin
• Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow. Abraham Lincoln
• Don’t water your weeds. Harvey Mackay
• If the human mind naturally produces noisome weeds, it also produces flowers and fruit; and … the best method to mend the soil in general, is for each of us to cultivate his own particular spot. Fulke Greville
• The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition, and not our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go. Martha Washington
• We cultivate our feelings the way we cultivate a garden: we can’t entirely prevent weeds from coming up, but we can take care to remove them before they do much harm. Phillip Cary
• We plant seeds that will flower as results in our lives, so best to remove the weeds of anger, avarice, envy, and doubt, that peace and abundance may manifest for all. Dorothy Day
• When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles. Horace Walpole
• Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds? Chuang Tzu
• You have now learned that the mind is like a fertile garden and for it to flourish, you must nurture it daily. Never let the weeds of impure thought and action take the garden of your mind. Robin Sharma
• Your life is your garden, your thoughts are the seeds. If your life isn’t awesome, you’ve been watering the weeds.  Terry Prince
• Your mind is like rich soil, and if given sufficient time any problem that comes along takes root like a weed, and then you have the trouble of pulling it out; but if you do not give the problem sufficient time to take root, then it has no place to grow and it will wither away. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Negativity

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Weed out vices too

• We would be well on the way to perfection if we could weed out one vice from ourselves each year. Thomas a Kempis
• Vice,  Sin

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Plant trees for the future, even if you won’t be the one to sit in the shade

• A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. Greek Proverb
• A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. Elton Trueblood
• Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. Martin Luther
• Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. Warren Buffett
• The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, “In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!” John F. Kennedy
• Trees

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Appreciate that the garden of your life will experience different seasons

• In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. William Blake
• A garden that never died eventually would weary. Robbed of springtime, unacquainted with the extraordinary perfume that rises from the soil after it’s had its rest, the garden that winter doesn’t visit is a dull place.  The return every spring of earth’s first freshness would never be kept if not for the frosts and rot and ripe deaths of fall.  So, when I go out from the garden for the last time in autumn, I leave the gate open behind me.  Michael Pollan
• Nothing fruitful ever comes when plants are forced to flower in the wrong season. Bette Bao Lord
• Life is a natural cycle

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Apply the lessons of the rose-bush to your life

• People can learn to study their life force in the same way that a master gardener studies a rosebush. No gardener ever made a rose.  When its needs are met a rosebush will make roses. Gardeners collaborate and provide conditions which favor this outcome.  And as anyone who has ever pruned a rosebush knows, life flows through every rosebush in a slightly different way.  Rachel Naomi Remen
• The best rose-bush, after all, is not that which has the fewest thorns, but that which bears the finest roses. Henry van Dyke

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