Alfred Austin Quotes

[A]mbition should be spoken of as not the last, but the first infirmity of noble minds, of which they gradually purge themselves as they grow more mature.

A writer cannot take his occupation too seriously. He cannot take himself too lightly.

If you are not something of a philosopher,—and by philosophy I understand a serene temper, and the maintaining of an equable mind under the sharpest disappointments,—I do not advise you to cultivate, or at any rate to grow enamoured of, a garden.

Whatever else he may do, a critic reveals and criticises himself.

[H]e who saves an ancient tree does better even than he who plants a new one.

[E]xclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.

[T]here is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to admit that you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Imagination should
A reconciler, not a rebel, be,
To teach the heart of man to apprehend
Nature's vicissitudes, and bear his own,
With sympathetic fancy.

Why should you,
Because the world is foolish, not be wise?

There is no office in this needful world
But dignifies the doer if done well.

The Devil is an echo
Of search unsatisfied.

Towns can be trusted to corrupt themselves.