Reynolds wrote that our mind was only barren soil, soon exhausted and unproductive unless it was continually fertilized with new ideas.

The human mind is like a fertile ground were seed are continually being planted. The seeds are opinions, ideas, and concepts. You plant a seed, a thought grows, and it grows. The word is like a seed and the human mind is so fertile!

Logic remains barren, unless it is fertilized by intuition.

Untilled ground, however rich, will bring forth thistles and thorns; so also the mind of man.

Imagine that your mind is a garden. You can tend to it in three ways: observe it, pull weeds, and plant flowers. Observing it is fundamental, and sometimes that’s all you can do. Perhaps something terrible has happened and you can only ride out the storm. But being with the mind is not enough; we must work with it as well. The mind is grounded in the brain, which is a physical system that doesn’t change for the better on its own. Weeds don’t get pulled and flowers don’t get planted simply by watching the garden.

A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

The soil of our mind contains many seeds, positive and negative. We are the gardeners who identify, water, and cultivate the best seeds.

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Your Mind is a Garden,
Your Thoughts are the Seeds.
You can grow Flowers
or weeds...

A mind perpetually open, will be a mind perpetually vacant!
العقل المنفتح على الدوام هو عقل فارغ على الدوام!

The mind gathers its grain in all fields, storing it against a time of need, then suddenly it bursts into awareness, which men call inspiration or second sight or a gift.

Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activity and vicissitude to the new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had undergone a kind of new creation, after its longsuspended life.

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense — no — but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.