Soil Quotes - Page 33

• Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil.

  Aristotle

  Garden

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• We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood

  Gamal Abdel Nasser

  War, Blood, Sand

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• It is the function of the Navy to carry the war to the enemy so that it will not be fought on U.S. soil.

  Chester W. Nimitz

  Military, War, Enemy

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• Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Flower, Men, Two

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

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• One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Writing, Mean, Dark

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• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Ocean, Lakes

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

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• In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

  Wendell Berry

  Kentucky, Order, Ifs And

  "Taking Care of What We’ve Been Given". Interview with Thomas P. Healy, www.counterpunch.org. April 15, 2006.

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• To be angry is very good. It burns out things and leaves nutrients in the soil. You should always be ready to be angry at injustice and cruelty.

  Maya Angelou

  Anger, Injustice, Should

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• In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

  Jhumpa Lahiri

  Jobs, Character, Suspense

  "Jhumpa Lahiri Was Abandoned by Her Editor" by Mark Follman, March 21, 2012.

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• Any human being exists only as a member of the wider community of life, air, water, and soil. We have no existence apart from the living earth. We are Earth. What we do to Earth, we do to our self.

  Michael Dowd

  Air, Self, Water

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• Talk uses up ideas. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.

  Doris Grumbach

  Air, Ideas, Silence

  Doris Grumbach (2014). “Fifty Days of Solitude: A Memoir”, p.49, Open Road Media

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• The American flag has not been planted on foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity's sake.

  William McKinley

  Humanity, Flags, Territory

  William McKinley's remarks on 1900 US campaign poster of McKinley and his choice for second term Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, July 12, 1900.

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• I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Men, House

  Henry David Thoreau, Nancy L. Rosenblum (1996). “Thoreau: Political Writings”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• Many people I've met believe that plants are made up of soil-that the tree outside your house, for example, is mostly made from the soil in which it grew. That's a common mistake. That tree is mostly made up of one of the gases in our air (carbon dioxide) and water (hydrogen and oxygen). Trees are solidified air and sunlight.

  Thom Hartmann

  Mistake, Believe, Light

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• A Song of the good green grass! A song no more of the city streets; A song of farms - a song of the soil of fields. A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk'd maize.

  Walt Whitman

  Song, Cities, Smell

  Walt Whitman, Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, William White (2008). “Leaves of Grass: Vol. I-III: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 1855-1856”, p.590, NYU Press

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• Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

  Nelson Mandela

  Beautiful, Country, Rainbow

  Presidential Inaugural Speech, delivered 10 May 1994, Pretoria, South Africa

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• Until you commit your goals to paper, you have intentions that are seeds without soil.

  Brian Tracy

  Goal, Paper, Intention

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• Africa is a paradox which illustrates and highlights neo-colonialism . Her earth is rich, yet the products that come from above and below the soil continue to enrich, not Africans predominantly, but groups and individuals who operate to Africa’s impoverishment.

  Kwame Nkrumah

  Colonialism, Groups, Earth

  Kwame Nkrumah (1965). “Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism”

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• The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. .. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Pain, Moving, Knowing

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• I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate.

  Ansel Adams

  Believe, Fate, Air

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• If you know how many acres you have sown of each kind of corn, inquire how much the acre the soil of that land takes for sowing, and count the number of quarters of seed, and you shall know the return of seed, and what ought to be over.

  Robert Grosseteste

  Land, Numbers, Sowing

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• The man who stands upon his own soil, who feels, by the laws of the land in which he lives,-by the laws of civilized nations,-he is the rightful and exclusive owner of the land which he tills, is, by the constitution of our nature, under a wholesome influence, not easily imbibed from any other source.

  Edward Everett

  Men, Law, Land

  Edward Everett (1839). “Selections from the Works of Edward Everett: With a Sketch of His Life”, p.62

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• The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.

  Wendell Berry

  Distance, Wine, Air

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• The earth's warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors, I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the green stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed.

  David Malouf

  Nature, Night, Smell

  David Malouf (2012). “An Imaginary Life”, p.147, Random House

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• The seed must move to the soil; the tree must turn to the sun. The river must leave its source to reach the sea. And man must forget man, the maker, in order to make the world.

  Harry Hooton

  Nature, Moving, Men

  Harry Hooton (1961). “It is Great to be Alive”

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