It's only after you get down into the technical weeds - and they are admittedly rather weedy - that it becomes clear that this is much harder than it seems and not something we're going to be able to solve.
Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.
I cultivate my flowers and burn my weeds.
It's disturbing how fast weeds take root in my garden of worthiness. They're so hard to pull. And grow back so easily.
Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds?
Reeducation needs careful tending, like an English lawn. Even one moment of negligence, and the weeds crop up again ~ those indestructible weeds of historical truth.
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.
Grace-driven effort wants to get to the bottom of behavior, not just manage behavior. If you're simply managing behavior but not removing the roots of that behavior, then the weeds simply sprout up in another place.
Without hard work, nothing grows but weeds.
Sometimes I think my soul is full of weeds!
When bad things happen, it's the time when you get to work in the garden and sort out the pots from the weeds.
Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
The seeds of Death are sown in us when we begin to live, and grow up till, like rampant weeds, they choak the tender flower of life.
Tend your own garden: savor the blossoms, trim the weeds.
Now 'tis spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted; Suffer them now and they'll o'ergrow the garden.
A good garden may have some weeds.
Start edifying the flowers. Stop pointing out the weeds.
We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue, a time to pull up weeds or to plant good seeds. Which is better is clear, for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative.