Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.
The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an “object.” This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.
There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance-almost is the revelation of ignorance.
Our obsession with security is a measure of the power we have granted the future to hold over us.
Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous.
All goes back to the earth, and so I do not desire pride of excess or power, but the contentments made by men who have had little: the fisherman’s silence receiving the river’s grace, the gardener’s musing on rows...
I lack the peace of simple things. I am never wholly in place. I find no peace or grace. We sell the world to buy fire, our way lighted by burning men...
All we can do to prepare rightly for tomorrow is to do the right thing today.
It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.
Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.
The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.
Far from making peace, wars invariably serve as classrooms and laboratories where men and techniques and states of mind are prepared for the next war.
We are living even now among punishments and ruins.
To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.
I would like you to show me, if you can, where the line can be drawn between an organism and it’s environment. The environment is in you. It’s passing through you. You’re breathing it in and out. You and every other creature.
We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.
To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.
These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.
If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.