Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.
All our yesterdays are summarized in our now, and all the tomorrows are ours to shape.
If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
You fight dandelions all weekend, and late Monday afternoon there they are, pert as all get out, in full and gorgeous bloom, pretty as can be, thriving as only dandelions can in the face of adversity.
All walking is discovery. On foot we take the time to see things whole.
Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law.
April is a promise that May is bound to keep.
Autumn is the eternal corrective. It is ripeness and color and a time of maturity; but it is also breadth, and depth, and distance. What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?
The earth turns, and the seasons, and for all his pride and power man cannot temper the winds or change their course. They are the unseen tides that shape our days and our years.
You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.
The longer I live and the more I read, the more certain I become that the real poems about spring aren’t written on paper. They are written in the back pasture and the near meadow, and they are issued in a new revised edition every April.
March is a tomboy with tousled hair, a mischievous smile, mud on her shoes and a laugh in her voice.
Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.
For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is.
The earth’s distances invite the eye. And as the eye reaches, so must the mind stretch to meet these new horizons. I challenge anyone to stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see a new expanse not only around him, but in him, too.
To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.
Time has its own dimensions, and neither the sun nor the clock can encompass them all.
If you ever wondered why fishing is probably the most popular sport in this country, watch that boy beside on the water and you will learn. If you are really perceptive you will. For he already knows that fishing is only one part fish.
Man is wise and constantly in quest of more wisdom; but the ultimate wisdom, which deals with beginnings, remains locked in a seed.
Time after time … today’s crisis shrinks to next week’s footnote to a newly headline disaster.
To know after absence the familiar street and road and village and house is to know again the satisfaction of home.
There it is, fog, atmospheric moisture still uncertain in destination, not quite weather and not altogether mood, yet partaking of both.
Summer is a promissory note signed in June, its long days spent and gone before you know it, and due to be repaid next January.
