Peaceableness toward enemies is an idea that will, of course, continue to be denounced as impractical. It has been too little tried by individuals, much less by nations. It will not readily or easily serve those who are greedy for power. It cannot be effectively used for bad ends. It could not be used as the basis of an empire. It does not afford opportunities for profit. It involves danger to practitioners. It requires sacrifice. And yet it seems to me that it is practical, for it offers the only escape from the logic of retribution. It is the only way by which we can cease to look to war for peace. ... Peaceableness is not passive. It is the ability to act to resolve conflict without violence. If it is not a practical and practicable method, it is nothing. As a practicable method, it reduces helplessness in the face of conflict. In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.
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As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association and affection.
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History leaves no doubt that among of the most regrettable crimes committed by human beings have been committed by those human beings who thought of themselves as civilized. What, we must ask, does our civilization possess that is worth defending? One thing worth defending, I suggest, is the imperative to imagine the lives of beings who are not ourselves and are not like ourselves: animals, plants, gods, spirits, people of other countries, other races, people of the other sex, places and enemies.
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Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
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I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
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The change of mind I am talking about involves not just a change of knowledge, but also a change of attitude toward our essential ignorance, a change in our bearing in the face of mystery. The principle of ecology, if we will take it to heart, should keep us aware that our lives depend on other lives and upon processes and energies in an interlocking system that, though we can destroy it, we can neither fully understand nor fully control. And our great dangerousness is that, locked in our selfish and myopic economies, we have been willing to change or destroy far beyond our power to understand.
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Under the rule of the free market ideology, we have gone through two decades of an energy crisis without an effective energy policy. Because of an easy and thoughtless reliance on imported oil, we have no adequate policy for the conservation of gasoline and other petroleum products. We have no adequate policy for the development or use of other, less harmful forms of energy. We have no adequate system of public transportation.
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Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.
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Grow we must, if we outgrow all that loves us.
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Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
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In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world.
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To reach a port we must sail, sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it. But we must not drift or lie at anchor.
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The best education in the world is that got by struggling to get a living.
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On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.
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To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.
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It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are.
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A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.
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Husband and wife come to look alike at last
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Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
Friendship
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Apology is only egotism wrong side out.
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When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?
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The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size.
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Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
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A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
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No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul it takes one that knows it well -- parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.
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Fresh air is good if you do not take too much of it; most of the achievements and pleasures of life are in bad air.
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Truth, when not sought after, rarely comes to light.
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The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
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I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.
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A person is always startled when he hears himself called old for the first time.
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