QuoteProject
Gardening is a luxury occupation: an ornament, not a necessity, of life.... Fortunate gardener, who may preoccupy himself solely with beauty in these difficult and ugly days! He is one of the few people left in this distressful world to carry on the tradition of elegance and charm. A useless member of society, considered in terms of economics, he must not be denied his rightful place. He deserves to share it, however humbly, with the painter and poet.
Vita Sackville-West
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Gardening is a pursuit of beauty and elegance, valued for its aesthetic contributions rather than its economic utility.

This quote emphasizes the significance of gardening as an art form and a means of cultivating beauty in a chaotic world. It suggests that those who engage in gardening do so not for economic gain, but for the fulfillment and joy it brings, akin to the lives of artists and poets who contribute to society through their creativity and aesthetic expressions. In times of distress, gardening serves as a vital and noble occupation that elevates the human experience.

Themes

GardeningBeautyArtEleganceLuxurySociety

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of arts in community life, one could use this quote to highlight the value of beauty.

More from Vita Sackville-West

The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Vita Sackville-WestRead
I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves.
Vita Sackville-WestRead
The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.
Vita Sackville-WestRead
It is a sad moment when the first phlox appears. It is the amber light indicating the end of the great burst of early summer and suggesting that we must now start looking forward to autumn. Not that I have any objection to autumn as a season, full of its own beauty; but I just cannot bear to see another summer go, and I recoil from what the first hint of autumn means.
Vita Sackville-WestRead
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-WestRead
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How _x000D_ else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?
Vita Sackville-WestRead

Similar quotes

I've found that music allows years to fold like an accordion over each other, so I guess you don't feel the passage of time as much.
Amy GrantRead
I like simplicity. I like using natural sources. I like images to look natural - as though somebody sitting in a room by a lamp is being lit by that lamp.
Roger DeakinsRead
When you work on something that combines both the spectacular and the relatable, the hyperreal and the real, it suddenly can become supernatural. The hypothetical and the theoretical can become literal.
J. J. AbramsRead
I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the color. If one could only catch that true color of nature - the very thought of it drives me mad.
Andrew WyethRead
Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene.
John HustonRead
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio PazRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.