If you plant where savages are, do not only entertain them with trifles and jingles, but use them justly and graciously.

-Bacon, Francis,Viscount St Albans
  Essays, no.33,'Of Plantations'.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: Atimeto be born, and atimeto die; atimetoplant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; Atimetoweep, and atimeto laugh; atimetomourn, and a time to dance: A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

-Bible (Old Testament)
Ecclesiastes 3:1^8.

Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the L revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely hehath borne ourgriefs, and carried our sorrows.

-Bible (Old Testament)
ORDIsaiah 53:1^4.

In sculpture, did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoo«  n how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

-Emerson, RalphWaldo
the 1841  'Thoughts on  Art', in The Dial, vol.1, no.3,  Jan.

Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.

-Milton,John
  Lycidas, l.78.

O que trois et quatre fois heureux sont ceux qui plantent choux! Oh, those who plant cabbages are three and four times happier than the rest of us!

-Rabelais, Fran c° ois
  Quart Livre, pt.18.

A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew. 785

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'The Sensitive Plant', pt.1, l.1.

The vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. 786 The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
A Defence of Poetry.

If my IQ had beentwo points lower,I'd have beena plant somewhere.

-Trevino, Lee Buck
Quoted in ColinJarmanThe Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).