Life & Wisdom Quote by Lester Cole

It borrows the calm authority of a proverb, then quietly smuggles in a worldview: beauty is not an accident, its a practice. By attributing the line to "The Japanese", Cole leans on an American mid-century habit of treating Japan as shorthand for disciplined artistry and patient craft. That move is doing rhetorical heavy lifting. The sentence sounds like timeless wisdom, not personal opinion, which lets the speaker advocate control and effort without sounding controlling.

The conditional structure is the engine. "If... it must..". turns aesthetics into obligation. A flower reads as natural, spontaneous, innocent; cultivation reads as intervention, technique, even pruning. Put together, the quote reframes beauty as something made, not found. The subtext is a rebuke to romantic myths: raw talent, effortless charm, genius that arrives fully formed. Cole, a screenwriter who worked inside a famously industrial creative machine, knew how many hands touch a "beautiful" thing before it reaches the audience. In Hollywood, the flower is the finished film; cultivation is rewrites, notes, censorship pressures, budgets, timing, the invisible labor that viewers prefer to imagine isnt there.

There is also a darker edge: cultivation can mean care, but it can also mean domestication. When you insist beauty "must" be cultivated, you imply someone gets to decide what counts as beautiful, and which wildness should be trimmed away. That tension - craft as devotion, craft as control - is what gives the line its staying power.