It is the privilege and the labor of the apprentice of creation to come with his imagination into the unimaginable, and with his speech into the unspeakable.
People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.
The soil under the grass is dreaming of a young forest, and under the pavement the soil is dreaming of grass.
You can’t know where life will take you, but you can commit to a direction.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.
All right, every day ain’t going to be the best day of your life, don’t worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.
Physical health doesn’t exist apart from the health of other things. Health ultimately involves the community, and the community ultimately involves the place and natural life of that place, so that real health is harmony with the world.
Our model citizen is a sophisticate who, before puberty, understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato.
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.
It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.
The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.
There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.