Desert Quotes - Page 27

• The high desert has an effect on people. The place has a way of swallowing you up.

  Campbell Scott

  People, Swallowing, Way

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• Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike...If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Attitude, Believe, Rivers

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• From the desert I come to thee, On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.

  Bayard Taylor

  Wind, Fire, Desire

  Bayard Taylor (1857). “Poems of the Orient”, p.86

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• The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love. While I was conducting experiments to make spineless cacti, I often talked to the plants. . . . "You have nothing to fear," I would tell them. "You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you." Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety.

  Luther Burbank

  Love, Secret, Needs

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• There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!

  John Vianney

  Attachment, Two, Clothes

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• A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition.

  Maria Mitchell

  Travel, Stars, Acquisition

  Maria Mitchell (1896). “Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals”

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• God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!--Ah, but fools Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are God!--what schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules: 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.

  Matthew Arnold

  God, School, Church

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• The world is empty - all of the people and places, the earth, the seas, mountains, deserts, forests and cities, and the beings that inhabit them, are unchangeable.

  Frederick Lenz

  Cities, Sea, People

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• Dispossessed peasants slash-and-burn their way into the rain forests of Latin America, hungry nomads turn their herds out into fragile African rangeland, reducing it to desert, and small farmers in India and the Philippines cultivate steep slopes, exposing them to the erosive powers of rain. Perhaps half the world's billion-plus absolute poor are caught in a downward spiral of ecological and economic impoverishment. In desperation, they knowingly abuse the land, salvaging the present by savaging the future.

  Alan Thein Durning

  Latin, Rain, Land

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• Indeed, as we begin the twenty-first century, the money and traditional economies are slowly destroying their own support system. Increasing demands of the two economies are surpassing the sustainable yields of the ecosystems that underpin them. For example, one-third of the world's cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining its long-term productivity, fully half of the world's rangeland is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert, and the world's forests have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are continuing to shrink.

  Stuart L. Hart

  Support Systems, Yield, Land

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• I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.

  Margaret Fuller

  Thinking, Heaven, Rising

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• Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

  Derrick Jensen

  Dog, Forests, Heels

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• And when night, guiding her bright train of stars, Throws o'er the sleeping world her gloomy veil, Lonely amidst the desert and the darkness, Musing upon the night's calm majesty; Wrapt up in quietness, with shade and silence, My soul more closely worshippeth Thy presence; With an internal day I feel enlighten'd, And hear a voice, which biddeth me to hope.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Lonely, Stars, Sleep

  Alphonse de Lamartine (1849). “A biographical sketch: the poetical meditations : and, poetical and religious harmonies”, p.18

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• Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.

  Edward Abbey

  Philosophy, Lying, Mean

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• I like living in the city where I have all my books and music and can go out to buy that night's dinner or easily see a band. But I also like the wild places, especially hiking in the desert and the Eastern woodlands. Do I have to choose?

  Charles de Lint

  Book, Night, Cities

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• Man is a living lie--a bitter jest Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Lying, Men, Bitter

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• By fate, not option, frugal Nature gave One scent to hyson and to wall-flower, One sound to pine-groves and to water-falls, One aspect to the desert and the lake. It was her stern necessity : all things Are of one pattern made; bird, beast, and flower, Song, picture, form, space, thought, and character Deceive us, seeming to be many things, And are but one.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Song, Nature, Wall

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Poems”, p.159, The Floating Press

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• That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Retirement, Solitude, World

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.135

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• There is no quality of the mind, or of the body, that so instantaneously and irresistibly captivates, as wit. An elegant writer has observed that wit may do very well for a mistress, but that he should prefer reason for a wife. He that deserts the latter, and gives himself up entirely to the guidance of the former, will certainly fall into many pitfalls and quagmires, like him who walks by flashes of lightning, rather than the steady beams of the sun.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Fall, Giving, Wife

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.49

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• The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Loneliness, Men, Suffering

  Emile M. Cioran (1975). “A short history of decay”, Viking Books

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• The idea of being in the desert is fundamental, but it's totally relative, and it's about that membrane: the way that one defines self versus the environment.

  Tavares Strachan

  Self, Ideas, Fundamentals

  "Tavares Strachan's Desert Explosion". Interview with Matt Mullen, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 1, 2017.

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• Think, "I am beyond the body. This body is just a water bubble. I am beyond the mind. This mind is just a mad monkey. I am the Atma. I and God are one. Before this body was formed I was there. After this body leaves I am there. Without this body I am still there. I am omnipresent. I am all." To reach this truth you have to do some spiri­tual practice. You have to inquire, "What is God? Who is God? Who am I?" Jesus spent twelve years in the desert; then he realized. You must also do some Sadhana.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Jesus, Thinking, Years

  Source: souljourns.net

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• [With theater] you draw the audience into the room as best you can, and in film, you can draw them into the room, you can draw them outside into the desert, you can take them out into the ocean, you can do all these amazing things.

  Kenneth Lonergan

  Ocean, Rooms, Film

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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• What is revolutionary today is that we're using precision-guided munitions. And instead of building individual weapons, we are building an industry and a philosophy, the culture of precision. You saw Desert Storm. Precision works.

  George Friedman

  Philosophy, Storm, Culture

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals.

  Noam Chomsky

  Kings, Hate, Thinking

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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