When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

There really is no difference between the bully and the victim.

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

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

I grew up in the golden age of Flash Gordon and sci-fi.

Every loss of life is terrible.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

When nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

As a boy, because I was born and raised in Ohio, about 60 miles north of Dayton, the legends of the Wrights have been in my memories as long as I can remember.

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

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

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

My grandmother used to embarrass me more, when she would pick me up from school wearing a big fuzzy hat. I didn’t like that.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Don’t judge other people. For example, if you want God’s anointing to be on you for parenting, you need to be careful not to criticize other parents.

But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

I hate to see anybody sink. I hate to see anybody lose their dream, lose their home, something like that.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

When we believe the best of people, we let go of each thing they do that is hurtful to us. And we choose to think things like, ‚I don’t believe they meant to hurt me.‘ ‚Maybe they’re having a bad day or don’t feel well.‘ ‚They probably don’t even realize how they sound.‘

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else’s shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

A queer fellow and a jolly fellow is the grasshopper. Up the mountains he comes on excursions, how high I don’t know, but at least as far and high as Yosemite tourists.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

I have always held firmly to the thought that each one of us can do a little to bring some portion of misery to an end.

I’m actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state.

The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.

I played with two lines of action figures when I was a kid: G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.

So let’s be honest with ourselves and not take ourselves too serious, and never condemn the other fellow for doing what we are doing every day, only in a different way.

I would like to go back to Wales. I’m obsessed with my childhood and at least three times a week dream I am back there.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‚Wind in the Willows‘ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‚The Wind in the Willows.‘