Soil Quotes - Page 36

• 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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• I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful. And I had no other ambition than to discover with the help of new means those deep inner ties that linked me to the very soil.

  Maurice de Vlaminck

  Beautiful, Ambition, Mean

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• The wrecking ball is characteristic of our way with materials. We 'cannot afford' to log a forest selectively, to mine without destroying topography, or to farm without catastrophic soil erosion. A production-oriented economy can indeed live in this way, but only so long as production lasts.

  Wendell Berry

  Erosion, Long, Environmental

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• We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

  Rowan Williams

  Eye, Animal, Ecosystems

  Rowan Williams (2012). “Faith in the Public Square”, p.188, A&C Black

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• There would be no call for ecological campaigning had nature not been exploited and abused. We experience the ground now bringing forth thistles as soil erosion devastates formerly arable land and deserts overtake fertile farms. Rivers and the atmosphere are polluted thoughtlessly and we are fearful of the consequences of a depleted ozone layer and the devastation of the greenhouse effect. We are not quite at home in our world, and somewhere in each of us there is a nostalgia for a paradise that has been lost.

  Desmond Tutu

  Home, Rivers, Ozone

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• Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.

  Joel Salatin

  Mean, Thinking, Desire

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• It is therefore absurd to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists. A medical doctor uninterested in nutrition, in agriculture, in the wholesomeness of mind and spirit is as absurd as a farmer who is uninterested in health. Our fragmentation of this subject cannot be our cure, because it is our disease. The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think that bodily health is compatible with spiritual confusion or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or impoverished soil.

  Wendell Berry

  Spiritual, Thinking, Air

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.99, Counterpoint

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• Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity.

  David W. Orr

  Real, Issues, Water

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• ... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the mind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing; or, like the uncultivated soil, brings forth thorns and thistles. Again, continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system become worn out with toil and fatigue; nature herself becomes almost exhausted, and we care but little whether we live or die.

  Maria W. Stewart

  Ideas, Soul, Mind

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• Beyond its practical aspects, gardening - be it of the soil or soul - can lead us on a philosophical and spiritual exploration that is nothing less than a journey into the depths of our own sacredness and the sacredness of all beings. After all, there must be something more mystical beyond the garden gate, something that satisfies the soul's attraction to beauty, peace, solace, and celebration.

  Christopher McDowell

  Beauty, Spiritual, Philosophical

  "The Sanctuary Garden: Creating a Place of Refuge in Your Yard Or Garden". Book by Christopher Forrest McDowell, 1998.

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• Every soil does not produce every material.

  Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune

  Doe, Produce, Materials

  "Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth". Book by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (§ 2), 1766.

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• The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Animal, Progress, Population

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.297

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• Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well contented with fine saloons. But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women, health and peace, and is still nothing at last; a long way leading nowhere.--Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Horse, Selfish, Pride

  Ralph Waldo, Emerson, (2013). “Nature - Conduct of Life”, p.191, Read Books Ltd

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• There are many eyes that can detect and honor the prudent and household virtues; there are many that can discern Genius on his starry track, though the mob is incapable; but when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring, which has vowed to itself, that it will be a wretch and also a fool in this world, sooner than soil its white hands by any compliances, comes into our streets and houses,--only the pure and aspiring can know its face, and the only compliment they can pay it, is to own it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Jesus, Eye, Hands

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.60, Courier Corporation

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• Humility is a fertile soil where spirituality grows and produces the fruit of inspiration to know what to do. It gives access to divine power to accomplish what must be done. An individual motivated by a desire for praise or recognition will not qualify to be taught by the Spirit. An individual who is arrogant or who lets his or her emotions influence decisions will not be powerfully led by the Spirit.

  Richard G. Scott

  Inspiration, Humility, Giving

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• Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men. Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music that can be brought to disengage him.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Men, Race, Organization

  Ralph Waldo, Emerson, (2013). “Nature - Conduct of Life”, p.213, Read Books Ltd

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• Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised the conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Country, Home, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1983). “Essays and Lectures”, p.215, Library of America

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• Optimism will grow like a flower if the soil be properly prepared.

  Arthur Lynch

  Flower, Optimism, Grows

  Arthur Lynch (1921). “Moods of Life: Popular Psychological Studies of Affairs of Every Day”

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• As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too - a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people - so that those who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  School, Justice, People

  Remarks at Gettysburg on Civil Rights, teachingamericanhistory.org. May 30, 1963.

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• Time, the greatest enemy of man, is an addict who smokes the cigarette of life and uses God's soil as an ashtray.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Life, Men, Enemy

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