Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
If we do not serve what coheres and endures, we serve what disintegrates and destroys.
The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
Our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land
If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat every time it hailed.
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.
I go among trees and sit still. All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.
Long live gravity! Long live stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces of fantasy capitalism!
Perhaps all the good that ever has come here has come because people prayed it into the world.
Willing to die you give up your will; keep still, until moved by what moves all else, you move.
Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?
If we can't afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we're in an insurmountable mess.
The latest technology is not always good for anything except to the producers of the technology.
The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.
Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymuosly in the life of some ex-student's grandchild.
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
We have forgotten that Vietnam, and Iraq resent being invaded and know the ground better than we do.
We can grow good wheat and make good bread only if we understand that we do not live by bread alone.
The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.
It was a country . . . that he and his people had known how to use and abuse, but not how to preserve.
We are alive within mystery, by miracle... We have more than we can know. We know more than we can say.
To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.
The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
An agrarian mind begins with the love of fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking & good eating
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
There’s nothing under the ground that’s worth more than the little layer of topsoil sitting on top of it.
The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.
We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making
It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
...And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.