John Steinbeck
Novelist, Journalist
"The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world."
Eden quotes
Eden
160 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Thomas Cole
Painter
"We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out is our own ignorance and folly."
Mark Twain
Writer, Humorist
"Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant."
John Steinbeck
Novelist, Journalist
"This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected."
J. R. R. Tolkien
Novelist, Scholar
"We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile."
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Eden quotes (page 1 of 8)
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"The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards -- material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden."
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"Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay."
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"He was born in fury and he lived in lightning. Tom came headlong into life. He was a giant in joy and enthusiasms. He didn't discover the world and its people, he created them. When he read his father's books, he was the first. He lived in a world shining and fresh and as uninspected as Eden on the sixth day. His mind plunged like a colt in a happy pasture, and when later the world put up fences, he plunged against the wire, and when the final stockade surrounded him, he plunged right through it and out. And as he was capable of giant joy, so did he harbor huge sorrow."
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"Fake is as old as the Eden tree."
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"It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them."
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"It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden of Eden."
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"We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens."
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"Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps."
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"But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not."
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"Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away."
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"Who can stop climate change? We can. You and you and you, and me. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so that began in the genesis of humanity, when God commanded the earliest human inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, "to till it and keep it". To "keep" it; not to abuse it, not to make as much money as possible from it, not to destroy it."
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"The garden [of Eden] is the realm of pure beauty from which man is expelled when he becomes interested in ethics, in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The return into paradise, the homecoming, depends on him penetrating the veils of morality to glimpse again the lineaments of lost beauty."
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"My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was – liberty."
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"I also know that we must cultivate our garden. For when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest."
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"I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.... The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?"
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"The ancestral deed is thought and done, And in a million Edens fall A million Adams drowned in darkness, For small is great and great is small, And a blind seed all."
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"As he weeps to wicked birds of prey, who pick up on his bread crumb sins, and there are no sins inside the Gates of Eden."
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"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
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"Love doesn't grow on trees like apples in Eden - it's something you have to make. And you must use your imagination too."
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"There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven"
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