Quotes about Harmony

Woods I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.

All women is brothers,' Burley Coulter used to say, and then look at you with a dead sober look as if he didn't know why you thought that was funny. But, as usual, he was telling the truth. Or part of it.

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: "boomers" and "stickers." Boomers, he said, are "those who pillage and run," who want "to make a killing and end up on Easy Street," whereas stickers are "those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one. There is good reason to think that we cannot live without it. Kind is obviously related to kin, but also to race and to nature. In the Middle Ages kind and nature were synonyms. Equal, in the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence, could be well translated by these terms: All men are created kin, or of a kind, or of the same race or nature.

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.

A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

It might prove out to be," Athey said, "that if we can't live together we can't live at all. Did you ever think about that?

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

Respect, I think, always implies imagination - the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.