C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Agriculture
The farmers are the founders of civilization.
The divine chemistry works in the subsoil.
Time spent in the cultivation of the fields passes very pleasantly.
He who owns the soil, owns up to the sky.
Command large fields, but cultivate small ones.
A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.
He that sows his grain upon marble will have many a hungry belly before his harvest.
Earth is here so kind, that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
Methinks I have a great desire to a bottle of hay: good hay, sweet hay, hath no fellow.
In ancient times, the sacred plough employed the kings, and awful fathers of mankind.
Praise a large domain, cultivate a small state.
Smoothly and lightly the golden seed by the furrow is covered.
Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind.
The life of the husbandman,—a life fed by the bounty of earth and sweetened by the airs of heaven.
An agricultural life is one eminently calculated for human happiness and human virtue.
The first farmer was the first man, and all historic nobility rests on possession and use of land.
Let the farmer forevermore be honored in his calling; for they who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.
He who would look with contempt upon the farmer’s pursuit is not worthy the name of a man.
The sun, which ripens the corn and fills the succulent herb with nutriment, also pencils with beauty the violet and the rose.
The frost is God’s plough, which He drives through every inch of ground in the world, opening each clod, and pulverizing the whole.
If we estimate dignity by immediate usefulness, agriculture is undoubtedly the first and noblest science.
Trade increases the wealth and glory of a country; but its real strength and stamina are to be looked for among the cultivators of the land.
The first three men in the world were a gardener, a ploughman, and a grazier: and if any man object that the second of these was a murderer, I desire he would consider that as soon as he was so, he quitted our profession and turned builder.
“Agriculture, for an honorable and high-minded man,” says Xenophon, “is the best of all occupations and arts by which men procure the means of living.”
God Almighty first planted a garden; and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures: it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man.
Agriculture is the noblest of all alchemy; for it turns earth, and even manure, into gold, conferring upon its cultivator the additional reward of health.
In the age of acorns, antecedent to Ceres and the royal ploughman Triptolemus, a single barley-corn had been of more value to mankind than all the diamonds that glowed in the mines of India.
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of in mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
It is not known where he that invented the plough was born nor where be died; yet he has effected more for the happiness of the world than the whole race of heroes and of conquerors who have drenched it with tears and manured it with blood, and whose birth, parentage, and education have been handed down to us with a precision precisely proportionate to the mischief they have done.
In a moral point of view, the life of the agriculturist is the most pure and holy of any class of men: pure, because it is the most healthful, and vice can hardly find time to contaminate it; and holy, because it brings the Deity perpetually before his view, giving him thereby the most exalted notions of supreme power, and the most fascinating and endearing view of moral benignity.