“Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.”

The only time I’ve been arrested was in opposing the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana. That was in 1979.

If we can’t afford to take good care of the land that feeds us, we’re in an insurmountable mess.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The atmosphere, the earth, the water and the water cycle – those things are good gifts.

It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer.

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.

Industrial agriculture characteristically proceeds by single solutions to single problems: If you want the most money from your land this year, grow the crops for which the market price is highest.

There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

The primary motive for good care and good use of the land-community is always going to be affection, which is too often lacking.

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.

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.

And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease.

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.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…

The fertility cycle is a cycle entirely of living creatures passing again and again through birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

I am trying to awake the energy contained in the air. These are the main sources of energy. What is considered as empty space is just a manifestation of matter that is not awakened.

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

All music is is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

It is not in the shallow physical imitation of men that women will assert first their equality and later their superiority, but in the awakening of the intellect of women.

And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally.

The people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people.