“To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.”

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

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.

I was a bright boy and I ought to make something out of myself… something else that would be a cut or two above my humble origins.

I’m a writer more than I am a talker.

We cannot comprehend what comprehends us.

When you are new at sheep-raising and your ewe has a lamb, your impulse is to stay there and help it nurse and see to it and all. After a while, you know that the best thing you can do is walk out of the barn.

A longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

The ecosystems, the ecosphere, those are good gifts.

I’ve had a good life, and was born to and among people I’ve admired and loved.

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

And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits.

These are people who are capable of devotion, public devotion, to justice. They meant what they said and every day that passes, they mean it more.

The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted.

The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Secretly we’re all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.