All times, we assume, are different; we therefore have nothing to learn from our elders, nothing to teach our children. Civilization is thus reduced to a sequence of last-minute improvisations, desperately building today out of the wreckage of yesterday.

Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

Unexpected wonders happen, not on schedule, or when you expect or want them to happen, but if you keep hanging around, they do happen.

After a while, though the grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.

The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.

You cannot devalue the body and value the soul Or value anything else.

They were not going to live again in a time like that.

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle -- those things are good gifts. The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts. We have to regard them as gifts because we couldn't make them. We have to regard them as good gifts because we couldn't live without them.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

One of the strongest of contemporary conventions is that of comparing to Thoreau every writer who has been as far out of the house as the mailbox.

An art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars.

We're trying to give the young people something that can help them, and we don't know exactly what it ought to be.

There are only two reasons to farm: because you have to, and because you love to. The ones who choose to farm choose for love.

Urban conservationists may feel entitled to be unconcerned about food production because they are not farmers. But they can't be let off so easily, for they are all farming by proxy.

Thinking is the most overrated human activity.

What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

Reverence makes it possible to be whole, though ignorant. It is the wholeness of understanding.