... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.

... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.