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

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.

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

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…

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.

When Cameron’s Conservatives come to power it will be a golden age for cyclists and an Elysium of cycle lanes, bike racks, and sharia law for bike thieves. And I hope that cycling in London will become almost Chinese in its ubiquity.

In the classic old business cycle, there would be a diminution in sales; it would take a little while for this information to reach corporate headquarters.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

Today, business is more like chess. Customer priorities change continually, and the signals given by these changes are vital clues to the next cycle of growth.

Transcending the cycle of death and rebirth is the real purpose of this life in human form.

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

In our view, successful reform is not an event. It is a sustainable process that will build on its own successes – a virtuous cycle of change.