nature and science
Masanobu Fukuoka
Yet man is a strange creature. He creates one troublesome condition after another and wears himself down observing each. But take all these artificial conditions away and he suddenly becomes very uneasy. Even though he may agree that the natural way of farming is legitimate, he seems to think that it takes extraordinary resolve to exercise the principle of "doing nothing."
David Abrams
Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity.
Edward Abbey
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless. Therefore the frogs, the toads, keep on singing even though we know, if they don't, that the sound of their uproar must surely be luring all the snakes and ringtail cats and kit foxes and coyotes and great horned owls toward the scene of their happiness.
Wendell Berry
To assume that the context of literature is "the literary world" is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for awhile yet. But they will finally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study of literature and restore it to importance.
Joseph Meeker
Comedy demonstrates that man is durable even though he be weak, stupid, undignified. As the tragic hero suffers or dies for his ideals, the comic hero survives without them. At the end of his tale he manages to marry his girl, evade his enemies, slip by the oppressive authorities, avoid drastic punishment, and to stay alive.
Tragedy demands that choices be made among alternatives; comedy assumes that all choice is likely to be in error and that survival depends upon finding accommodations that will permit all parties to endure.
Aldo Leopold
The duck hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accoutrements, are doing the same thing. Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, esthetic exercises.
Henry David Thoreau
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or further still, between him and it. Let him build himself a loghouse with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven years or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.
Gary Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom”
Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.
Elaine Scarry, “On beauty and being just”
Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction
What is a true metaphor? It is...'footsteps of nature' whose noise we hear alike in primitive language and in the finest metaphors of poets. Men do not invent those mysterious relations between separate external objects, and between objects and feelings or ideas, which it is the function of poetry to reveal.
Gary Snyder
Civilization, which has made us so successful a species, has overshot itself and now threatens us with inertia. There also is some evidence that civilized life isn't good for the gene pool. To achieve Changes we must change the very foundations of our society and our minds.