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

The connections between people and land are dangerously oversimplified and mainly technological.

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness. True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

The line that connects the bombing of civilian populations to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being.

It is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.