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

This, I thought, is what is meant by ‘thy will be done’ in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it.

The two great aims of industrialism – replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth into the hands of a small plutocracy – seem close to fulfillment.

Better than any argument is to rise at dawn and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.

My belief is that the world and our life in it are conditional gifts.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.

We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose.

For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless.

If conservationists will attempt to resume responsibility for their need to eat, they will be led back fairly directly to all their previous concerns for the welfare of nature.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

Whether we or 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.

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.

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.