Schemes are like fruit, they require a certain ripening.
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.
People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.
Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
Gestation requires protected space; ripening requires both permeability to the outer — and non-disturbance.
The Christian is like the ripening corn; the riper he grows the more lowly he bends his head.
The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.
To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required,--just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet
In the beginning, compassion is like the seed without which we cannot have any fruit; in the middle, compassion is like water to nourish the see we have planted; in the end, compassion is like the warmth of the sun that brings the fruit to ripening.
They are fruit and transport: ripening melons, prairie schooners journeying under full sail.
Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
