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.
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.
If you can read and have more imagination than a doorknob, what need do you have for a ‘movie version’ of a novel?
A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us.
Unless you absolutely have got to do it, don’t buy anything new.
You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough.
The life we want is not merely the one we have chosen and made. It is the one we must be choosing and making.
We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.
The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner.