Again I resume the long lesson: how small a thing can be pleasing, how little in this hard world it takes to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.
If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.
There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.
The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.
You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.
A man’s life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed.
The only true and effective “operator’s manual for spaceship earth” is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.
It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.
What I stand for is what I stand on.
Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.
Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.
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.
Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
The world is not given by our fathers, but borrowed from our children.
I’d rather rely on mother nature’s wisdom than man’s cleverness.
When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a ‘movie version’ of a novel?