It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man's life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death. What it gives up it takes back.

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.

The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.

The form of a poem is invisible. A poem is not an "object." This is hard to accept in a mechanical age.

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

The shoddy work of despair, the pointless work of pride, equally betray Creation. They are wastes of life.