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

There are endless ways to amuse oneself and be idle, and most of them lie outside the woods. I assume that when a man goes to the woods he goes because he needs to. I think he is drawn to the wilderness much as he is drawn to a woman: it is, in its way, his opposite. It is as far as possible unlike his home or his work or anything he will ever manufacture. For that reason he can take from it a solace-an understanding of himself, of what he needs and what he can do without-such as he can find nowhere else.

The river is of the earth and it is free. It is rigorously embanked and bound, and yet it is free. To hell with restraint, it says, I have got to be going. It will grind out its dams. It will go over or around them. They will become pieces.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.

Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism.

The mind that is not baffled, is unemployed

To have good farming or good land use of any kind, you have got to have limits. Capitalism doesn't acknowledge limits.