The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

I have no hostility to nature, but a child’s love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that people need to let God out of the Sunday morning box, that He doesn’t want to just be with you for an hour or two on Sunday morning and then put back in His box to sit there until you have an emergency, but He wants to invade your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Faith is easy; I think people complicate it.

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

I look forward to death with great anticipation, to meeting God face to face.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.

If I see a mountain, I just pick up and hike it.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

Great indeed is the sublimity of the Creative, to which all beings owe their beginning and which permeates all heaven.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

All religions have been made by men.

Every day is a gift from God. Learn to focus on the Giver and enjoy the gift!

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

Our God is a forgiving God.

When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans – an avian flu pandemic.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

But God can only smile because only God can know what is coming next.

Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.

Many readers fail to realize this, but ‚The Color Purple‘ is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one’s original God: the earth and nature.

We are all at times unconscious prophets.

I believe that Jesus realized his oneness with God and he showed, what he attempted to do was show the way to all of us, how to realize our own onenes with God also, so he’s a precursor.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

When granted many years of life, growing old in age is natural, but growing old with grace is a choice. Growing older with grace is possible for all who will set their hearts and minds on the Giver of grace, the Lord Jesus Christ.

This thing comes to me, not by the hearing of the ear, but by my own personal experience: I know of a surety that Jesus manifests Himself unto His people as He doth not unto the world.

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

When I’m in the house of God, I don’t wear my jewelry, if you’re looking for my jewelry. All you see is my heart of gold.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I didn’t want to submit to the army and then, on the day of judgment, have God say to me, ‚Why did you do that?‘ This life is a trial, and you realize that what you do is going to be written down for Judgment Day.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Prayer is a confession of one’s own unworthiness and weakness.