Weekend Words: Soil
"A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty."
In a 1977 interview in High Times, reprinted by Dangerous Minds, Ted Nugent — ultra-patriot, vocal Trump enthusiast, and this week’s White House dinner guest — boasted about his efforts to avoid service during the Vietnam War by soiling his pants prior to his physical exam, among other maneuvers.
Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
Consider what each soil will bear, and what each refuses.
—Virgil
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
—Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerally of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
—Vaclav Havel
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
—Simone Weil
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.
—Adlai Stevenson
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light?
—John Milton, “Paradise Lost”
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continuously fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
—Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourses on Art”
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.
—Mark Twain
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
—Charlotte Bronte
I would rather be tied to the soil as a serf […] than be king of all these dead and destroyed.
—Homer, The Odyssey
Soil of Flint, if steady tilled—
Will refund by Hand—
Seed of Palm, by Libyan Sun
Fructified in Sand —
—Emily Dickinson, 681
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.
—Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around caf?s.
—Ernest Hemingway
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
—Ezra Pound
