Quotes by Liberty Hyde Bailey

A garden is half-made when it is well planned. The best gardener is the one who does the most gardening by the winter fire.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
A person cannot love a plant after he has pruned it, then he has either done a poor job or is devoid of emotion.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Anyone who acquires more than the usual amount of knowledge concerning a subject is bound to leave it as his contribution to the knowledge of the world.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Even though the college man raises no more wheat than his neighbor, he will have more satisfaction raising it. He will know why he turns the clod; he will challenge the worm that burrows in the furrow; his eyes will follow the field mouse that scuds under the grass; he will see the wild fowl winging its way across the heaven. All these things will add to the meaning of life and they are his.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Every decade needs its own manual of handicraft.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Extension work is not exhortation. Nor is it exploitation of the people, or advertising of an institution, or publicity work for securing students. It is a plain, earnest, and continuous effort to meet the needs of the people on their own farms and in the localities.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Fact is not to be worshipped. The life which is devoid of imagination is dead; it is tied to the earth. There need be no divorce of fact and fancy; they are only the poles of experience. What is called the scientific method is only imagination set within bounds. Facts are bridged by imagination. They are tied together by the thread of speculation. The very essence of science is to reason from the known to the unknown.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Give the children an opportunity to make garden. Let them grow what they will. It matters less that they grow good plants than that they try for themselves.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Humble is the grass in the field, yet it has noble relations. All the bread grains are grass - wheat and rye, barley, sorghum and rice; maize, the great staple of America; millet, oats and sugar cane. Other things have their season but the grass is of all seasons... the common background on which the affairs of nature and man are conditioned and displayed.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
I do not yet know why plants come out of the land or float in streams, or creep on rocks or roll from the sea. I am entranced by the mystery of them, and absorbed by their variety and kinds. Everywhere they are visible yet everywhere occult.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
I have no patience with the doctrine of pure science, that science is science only when it is uncontaminated by application in the arts of life; and I also have no patience with the spirit that considers a piece of work to be legitimate only as it has direct bearing on the arts and affairs of men.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
If today you care only for pinks and roses and other prim garden flows, next year you will also admire the wild convolvulus on the old fence and the winter stalks of the sunflower. There are times and seasons for all plants. One's sympathies are wide, as one's life is full and resourceful.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Is there any progress in horticulture? If not, it is dead, uninspiring. We cannot live in the past, good as it is; we must draw our inspiration from the future.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
It is a marvelous planet on which we ride. It is a great privilege to live thereon, to partake in the journey, and to experience its goodness. We may cooperate rather than rebel. We should try to find the meanings rather than to be satisfied only with the spectacles. My life has been a continuous fulfillment of dreams.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
My life has been a continuous fulfillment of dreams. It appears that everything I saw and did has a new, and perhaps, more significant meaning, every time I see it. The earth is good. It is a privilege to live thereon.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
One does not begin to make a garden until he wants a garden. To want a garden is to be interested in plants, in the winds and rains, in birds and insects, in the warm-smelling earth.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
One never makes the quest unless the mind is open at the start. Herein does this mind differ from the advocate who must prove a case, from that of a preacher who must support a dogma, from that of the politician who must defend a party, from that of an organization that must enforce a policy. There are no parties in science.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
One's happiness depends less on what he knows than on what he feels.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Science may eventually explain the world of How. The ultimate world of Why may remain for contemplation, philosophy, religion.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Take out of nationalism the blind prejudice, the over-organization, the self-interest for territory and for gold, and you remove its fangs. You then have left a political system for common betterment, a community of ideals, concrete enthusiasms, a means of effective training, racial and geographical cohesions, and programs to direct the lives of the people.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
Teachers of agricultural subjects who do not investigate are either dead or superficial, and in either case they are useless.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
The name of the subject is not fundamentally important. All subjects may be made the means of developing a man. What we call culture is not the result of a line of study, so much as the result of association with educated and sensitive persons. A well educated mind has a broad outlook. It develops beyond the specialist to the philosopher... We are learning that no subjects are unclean.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
The sense of conquest is in it. Not often is a collector able to obtain complete material in one assault. The plant may be at the moment sterile, or only in fruit or flower... but this lack has the advantage of stimulating the collector to go back in another season or year to complete the work.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
The true purpose of education is to teach a man to carry himself triumphant to the sunset.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
There are two essential epochs in any enterprise - to begin, and to get done.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
This College of Agriculture was not established to serve or to magnify Cornell University. It belongs to the people of the State. The farmers of the State have secured it. Their influence has placed it here. They will keep it close to the ground. If there is any man standing on the land, unattached, uncontrolled, who feels that he has a disadvantages and a problem, this College of Agriculture stands for that man.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
To people who grumbled at the weather he recommended a garden, as the best of remedies for that commonest of melancholies, for there is no weather that did not suit some plant. In the hottest and driest time the portulacas are burning red in the sand. In cool and cloudy weather the soft morning-glories remain open until noon. When the soil is soaked with rain the irises are in their glory.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
We accept it because we have seen the vision. We know that we cannot reap the harvest, but we hope that we may so well prepare the land and so diligently sow the seed that our successors may gather the ripened grain.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
We are now devoting ourselves to science. I am afraid some of us feel that science will give us final solutions - better bases for philosophy, an ideal groundwork for satisfactions, for enjoyment. But it is doubtful whether the mind of man can ever understand the universe. For every puzzle that we uncover and solve, two more appear that were hidden.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
We must tell it to the world that the higher education is necessary to the best agriculture. We must tell our friends of our enthusiasm for the generous life of the country. We must say that we believe in our ability to make good use of every lesson which the University has given us. We must say to every man that our first love is steadfast, our hopes are high, and our enthusiasm is great. Our hearts are so full that we must celebrate.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey
When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself.
– Liberty Hyde Bailey