Ponder the fact that God has made you a gardener, to root out vice and plant virtue.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in fostering good behavior and values while eliminating negativity.
St. Catherine of Siena's quote suggests that individuals have a divine role as gardeners in their own lives, tasked with nurturing positive qualities (virtues) and eradicating negative traits (vices). This imagery of gardening serves as a metaphor for personal growth and moral development, indicating that just as a gardener tends to their plants, we must actively cultivate our character and ethics.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
When it seems that God shows us the faults of others, keep on the safer side-it may be that your judgment is false. On your lips let silence abide. And any vice that you may ascribe to others, ascribe at once to them and yourself, in true humility. If that vice really exists in a person, he will correct himself better, seeing himself so gently understood, and will say of his own accord the thing that you would have said to him.
O unfathomable depth! O Deity eternal! O deep ocean! What more could You give me than to give me Yourself?
To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.
There is no perfect virtue-none that bears fruit- unless it is exercised by means of our neighbor.
Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being.
Everything comes from love, all is ordained for the salvation of man, God does nothing without this goal in mind.
We see it in the body, that if you just give the body enough rest and comfort, it has remarkable self-healing capacities. Well, so does the spirit.
He that speaks much, is much mistaken.
Lies always come first, dragging fools along by their irreparable vulgarity. Truth always lags last, limping along on the arm of time.
My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.
Crimson flames tied through my ears Rollin' high and mighty traps Pounced with fire on flaming roads Using ideas as my maps "We'll meet on edges, soon," said I Proud 'neath heated brow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth "Rip down all hate," I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers Foundationed deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
We learned about gratitude and humility - that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean... and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.
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