Soil Quotes - Page 38

• When you assess your own life, consider it with the eye of a gardener. Underneath the surface lies rich, fertile soil waiting to nurture the seeds you sow. Even more than you can imagine will grow there if given a chance.

  Steve Goodier

  Lying, Eye, Waiting

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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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• Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn.

  Philip Yancey

  Years, Oil, Aquifers

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• Graciousness, courtesy, compassion-this is hesed. Hesed is a quality that extends even to the animals and the land. The sabbath rest principle of Hebrew law included the needs of the livestock (Exod. 23:12). After seven years of planting and harvesting, the land itself needed "a year of complete rest" (Lev. 25:5). Even the soil of the vineyards was not to be overtaxed by planting other crops between the rows (Deut. 22:9). The oxen that trod out the grain were not to be muzzled so that they could eat while they worked (Deut. 25:4). And so on.

  Richard J. Foster

  Animal, Compassion, Oxen

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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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• 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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• 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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• The Captains of Industry have always counseled the rest of us "to be realistic." Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would stop buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favored minorities an equitable share of the loot?

  Wendell Berry

  Children, Air, Ecosystems

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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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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• A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."

  Leonard Sweet

  Real, Loss, Years

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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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• Yes, I am positive that one of the great curatives of our evils, our maladies, social, moral, and intellectual, would be a return to the soil, a rehabilitation of the work of the fields.

  Charles Wagner

  Evil, Intellectual, Rehabilitation

  Charles Wagner (1903). “Youth”

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• Gardeners know that you must nourish the soil if you want healthy plants. You must water the plants adequately, especially when seeds are germinating and sprouting, and they should be planted in a nutrient-rich soil. Why should nutrition matter less in the creation of young humans than it does in young plants? I'm sure that it doesn't.

  Ina May Gaskin

  Water, Healthy, Doe

  Ina May Gaskin (2010). “Ina May's Guide to Childbirth”, p.189, Random House

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• In the soil of the quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable.

  Wayne Muller

  Quiet, Problem, Quick Fixes

  Wayne Muller (2013). “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives”, p.4, Bantam

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• Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II.

  Eisaku Sato

  War, People, World

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• It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

  Wendell Berry

  Long, Analogies, Spirit

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• I elect to stay on the soil of which I was born and on the plot of ground which I have fairly bought and honestly paid for. Don't advise me to leave, and don't add insult to injury by telling me it's for my own good; of that I am to be the judge.

  Robert Purvis

  Insult To Injury, Judging, Plot

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• Till your mental soil with determination. Fertilize your emotional soil with positive words. And plant the seed of your heart's desire with your disciplined efforts.

  Iyanla Vanzant

  Determination, Heart, Emotional

  Iyanla Vanzant (2000). “Until Today!: Daily Devotions for Spiritual Growth and Peace of Mind”, Simon and Schuster

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• Everybody wants to reach the top of the mountain, but there is no growth at the peak. It is in the valley that we slog through the lush grass and rich soil, learning and becoming what enables us to summit life's next peak.

  Andy Andrews

  Motivational, Climbing, Growth

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• Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.

  Charles Kellogg

  Past, Rivers, Mountain

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• I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

  Peter Shaffer

  Moving, Book, Writing

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• Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

  Annie Proulx

  Rain, Hair, Rocks

  Annie Proulx (2011). “Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place”, p.190, Simon and Schuster

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• We are part of the earth and it is part of us ... What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

  Chief Seattle

  Son, Earth

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• Land is a nation's basis for existence. The nation has its roots like those of a tree deep in the country's soil whence it derives its nourishment and life. There is no people that can live without land, as there is no tree which can live hanging in air.

  Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

  Country, Air, Land

  Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (2015). “For My Legionaries”, p.106, Black House Publishing Ltd

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• Nature's ways are wonderful and unfathomable. The grain swells in the soil, the sprout grows and flowers when the time comes and then it bears new fruit and so does not die. We are like grain. We never die because we are One with Nature. To understand this is to comprehend Immortality--the Apotheosis of the Human Race. It is with this conviction that I have lived my Life. My Life is a store of my experience, a Life of aspirations, sorrows, joys and triumphs.

  Martiros Saryan

  Flower, Race, Joy

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