It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

The aphorism rejects wishful thinking in favor of deliberate effort. “Roses” stand for desirable outcomes—beauty, happiness, success, moral improvement—that people often hope will arrive by luck or providence (“rain”). Eliot’s point is practical and ethical: abundance comes from cultivation, not from passive expectation. The second clause intensifies the lesson by shifting from complaint to agency: if we want “more,” we must change our inputs—work, planning, patience, and repeated acts of care. The image also implies time and seasonality: planting precedes blooming, so the quote counsels perseverance and realistic causality rather than quick fixes.