Food For Thought

[see also: IDENTITY]

Names are a great mystery. I've never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this -- whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong.

[see also: PATRIOTISM]

I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.

Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

What would this country be without this great land of ours?

[see also: STATE]

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

[see also: ANIMALS, ECOLOGY, TREES]

You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

[In a state of nature] No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.

Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface; he, however, who would study nature in its wildness and variety, must plunge into the forest, must explore the glen, must stem the torrent, and dare the precipice.

The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

Nothing is great but the inexhaustible wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but she is million fathoms deep.

Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man.

As if our birth had at first sundered things, and we had been thrust up through into nature like a wedge, and not until the wound heals and the scar disappears, do we begin to discover where we are, and that nature is one and continuous everywhere.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

Only to the white man was nature a "wilderness" and only to him was the land "infested" with "wild" animals and "savage" people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it "wild" for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the "Wild West" began.

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

The "control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives, Henle's loops and all. Every glistening egg is a momento mori.

[see also: AVARICE, DESIRE, LUXURY]

Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, "How many things I have no need of!"

Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.

The desires of men increase with his acquisitions; every step which he advances brings something into view, which he did not see before, and which, as soon as he sees it, he begins to want. Where necessity ends curiosity begins, and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; instead of aiming at an abundance that did not and perhaps never would exist, he should have confined himself to the essential minimum, as certain very poor, primitive, or religious communities still do....

As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty.... Only a moral revolution -- not a social or a political or a technological one -- only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

[see also: MADNESS, PARANOIA]

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Work and love - these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.

[see also: HISTORY, MEMORY, PAST, TRADITION]

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

That sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.

Can anybody remember when times were not hard and money not scarce?

There is, indeed, a current misjudgment...which the exaggerated tone of rural literature generally, from Virgil down, has greatly encouraged. The rural writers dodge all the dirty work of the farm, and regale us with the odors of the new mown hay.

Many an old timer laments about the disappearance of this ale or that lager, and becomes nostalgic about the glories of some fondly-remembered brew, when he is really mourning the passing of his youth.

"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."