Thinking is the most overrated human activity.
For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar.
We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities.
We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody’s enemy.
Why I am NOT going to buy a computer.
The mercy of the world is time. Time does not stop for love, but it does not stop for death and grief, either.
If you eat, you are involved in agriculture.
When the mind’s an empty room The clear days come.
Our most serious problem, perhaps, is that we have become a nation of fantasists. We believe, apparently, in the infinite availability of finite resources.
That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as the soil-that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat-may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true.
It’s the impeded stream that sings.
If we represent knowledge as a tree, we know that things that are divided are yet connected. We know that to observe the divisions and ignore the connections is to destroy the tree.
The securest guarantee of the long-term good health of both farmland and city is, I believe, locally produced food.
We can make ourselves whole only by accepting our partiality, by living within our limits, by being humans not by trying to be gods.
As long as we insist on relating to it strictly on our own terms-as strange to us or subject to us-the wilderness is alien, threatening, fearful.
Education in the true sense, of course, is an enablement to serve-both the living human community in its natural household or neighborhood and the precious cultural possessions that the living community inherits or should inherit.
In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intelligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.
Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health.
People who want to see the beauty of nature from motorboats and automobiles would obviously be just as pleased, and as fully recreated, at a drive-in movie.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.