Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.
The incarnate Word is with us, is still speaking, is present always, yet leaves no sign but everything that is.
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a 'movie version' of a novel?
If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?
The only time I've been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.
The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.
I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.
Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.
It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.
We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.
We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.
Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.
To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.
The world, which God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal.
When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life.
It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons.
If you start a conversation with the assumption that you are right or that you must win, obviously it is difficult to talk.
Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.
It is wrong to condemn people for doing a thing and then offer no alternative but failure. A person could get mad about that.
The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.
Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.
A man who does not ask to much become the promise of his land. His marriage married to his place, he waits and does not stray.
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
Hunger is a powerful persuader if it happens, and it's conceivable that it could happen. Country people have always known this.
The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.
We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.
It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.
You don't need to be told some things. You can sometimes tell more by a man's silence and the set of his head than by what he says.
We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
The constructions of language, which is to say the constructions of thought, are formed within experience, not the other way around.
One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the gospels without feeling that something is amiss.
For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
People talk about "job creation," as if that had ever been the aim the industrial economy. The aim was to replace people with machines.
Why should conservationists have a positive interest in... farming? There are lots of reasons, but the plainest is: Conservationists eat.
Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.
Any religion has to have a practice. When you let it go so far from practice that it just becomes a matter of talk something bad happens.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.
The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.