What can’t be helped must be endured.
To mind being disliked by a woman you don’t desire and are not married to is yet another serious failure of common sense.
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 surely is far better to be disliked by somebody you don’t love than by somebody you do. Even so, I mind. Even so, failing to love somebody is a failure.
It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
The presence of the present has become insistent, undeniable, and I dare not look away.
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.
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.
The more artificial a human environment becomes, the more the word ‘natural’ becomes a term of value.
To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.
The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.
It’s impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.
Ask the world to reveal its quietude- not the silence of machines when they are still, but the true quiet by which birdsongs, trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms become what they are, and are nothing else.
The only sustainable city – and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal – is a city in balance with its countryside.
I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it’s being ruined is hard.
So it is that the life force may take possession of a man – so that in the end he may be possessed by something greater, no longer at all belonging to himself.
Novelty is a new kind of loneliness.
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.