Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Growth
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—A Death in the Desert. L. 447.
Treading beneath their feet all visible things,
As steps that upwards to their Father’s throne
Lead gradual.
Coleridge—Religious Musings.
Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.
Deuteronomy. XXXII. 15.
The lofty oak from a small acorn grows.
Lewis Duncombe—Translation of De Minimis Maxima.
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.
Goldsmith—The Traveller. L. 126.
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 falls and die that night—
It was the plant and flower of Light.
Ben Jonson—Pindaric Ode on the Death of Sir H. Morison.
Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.
Longfellow—Ladder of St. Augustine.
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.
Longfellow—Ladder of St. Augustine. St. 2.
And so all growth that is not towards God
Is growing to decay.
George MacDonald—Within and Without. Pt. I. Sc. 3.
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—Apology for Raimond Sebond. Bk. II. Ch. XII.
“Oh! what a vile and abject thing is man unless he can erect himself above humanity.” Here is a bon mot and a useful desire, but equally absurd. For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to stride further than the stretch of our legs, is impossible and monstrous…. He may lift himself if God lend him His hand of special grace; he may lift himself … by means wholly celestial. It is for our Christian religion, and not for his Stoic virtue, to pretend to this divine and miraculous metamorphosis.
Montaigne—Essays. Bk. II. Ch. XII.
Heu quotidie pejus! haec colonia retroversus crescit tanquam coda vituli.
Alas! worse every day! this colony grows backward like the tail of a calf.
Petronius—Cena. 44.
Fungino genere est: capite se totum tegit.
He is of the race of the mushroom; he covers himself altogether with his head.
Plautus—Trinummus. IV. 2. 9.
Post id, frumenti quum alibi messis maxima’st
Tribus tantis illi minus reddit, quam obseveris.
Heu! istic oportet obseri mores malos,
Si in obserendo possint interfieri.
Besides that, when elsewhere the harvest of wheat is most abundant, there it comes up less by one-fourth than what you have sowed. There, methinks, it were a proper place for men to sow their wild oats, where they would not spring up.
Plautus—Trinummus. IV. 4. 128.
Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. II. L. 136.
’Tis thus the mercury of man is fix’d,
Strong grows the virtue with his nature mix’d.
Pope—Essay on Man. Ep. II. L. 178.
Im engen Kreis verengert sich der Sinn.
Es wächst der Mensch mit seinen grössern Zwecken.
In a narrow circle the mind contracts
Man grows with his expanded needs.
Schiller—Prolog. I. 59.
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—The Heart of Midlothian. Ch. VIII.
Gardener, for telling me these news of woe,
Pray God the plants thou graft’st may never grow.
Richard II. Act III. Sc. 4. L. 100.
“Ay,” quoth my uncle Gloucester,
“Small herbs 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.
Richard III. Act II. Sc. 4. L. 12.
O, my lord,
You said that idle weeds are fast in growth:
The prince my brother hath outgrown me far.
Richard III. Act III. Sc. 1. L. 102.
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
Tennyson—In Memoriam. Pt. I.
The great world’s altar stairs
That slope through darkness up to God.
Tennyson—In Memoriam. LV.
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—The Seed Growing Secretly.
Lambendo effingere.
Lick into shape.
Vergil. See Suetonius—Life of Vergil. Lambendo paulatim figurant. Licking a cub into shape. Pliny—Nat. Hist. VIII. 36.
And that unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.
Wordsworth—Excursion. V. 158. (Knight’s ed.) From Daniel’s Essay XIV, in Coleridge—Friend. Introductory. Quam contempta res est homo, nisi super humana se erexerit. As said by Seneca. Amator Jesu et veritatis … potest se … elevare supra seipsum in spiritu. A lover of Jesus and of the truth … can lift himself above himself in spirit. Thomas á Kempis—Imitatio. II. 1.
Teach me, by this stupendous scaffolding,
Creation’s golden steps, to climb to Thee.
Young—Night Thoughts. Night IX.