When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all things inherited and free. All things superceded in our progress of innovations, whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm.

Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.