Donald Culross Peattie

I say that it touches a man that his blood is sea water and his tears are salt, that the seed of his loins is scarcely different from the same cells in a seaweed, and that of stuff like his bones are coral made. I say that physical and biologic law lies down with him, and wakes when a child stirs in the womb, and the sap in a tree, up rushing in the spring, and the smell of the loam, where the bacteria bestir themselves ind darkness, and the path of the sun in the heaven, these are facts of first important to his mental conclusions, and that a man who goes in no consciousness of them is a drifter and a dreamer, without a home or any contact with reality.

from "April 1," Almanac for Moderns

Loren Eisley

Ironically, I who profess no religion find the whole of my life a religious pilgrimage.

The religious forms of the present leave me unmoved. My eye is round, open, and undomesticated as an owl's in a primeval forest....

from All the Strange Hours

Theodore Roethke

Constricted by my tortured thought

I am too centered on this spot.
So caged, so cadged, so close within

A coat of unessential skin.
I would put off myself and flee

My inaccessibility.
A fool can play being solemn

Revolving on his spinal column.
Deliver me, O Lord, from all

Activity centripetal.

"Prayer before Study"

T.S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time. from "Four Quartets"

John Hall Wheelock

Leave starry heaven behind,
Enter the atom, shrink
Into the vast, and find
You stand upon the brink
Of starry heaven again-
There where you were you are,
Full circle come again,
On a journey circular,
Through the atom back to the stars.

"Circular Secret"

Pablo Neruda

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

from "Every Day You Play"

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

In each of us, through matter, the whole history of the world is in part reflected.

from The Divine Milieu

Frank Lloyd Wright

Only as a feature or a new part becomes a harmonious element in the harmonious whole does it arrive at the state of simplicity.

The Natural House

Alan Devoe

The life of earth is all of a piece. For all of us, whether men or toads or meadow-mice or towering trees, there is birth and a life adventure and ultimately a death; we are all a part of the same tremendous rhythms and rituals, all fragments of similar destiny, all travelers through the same inscrutable experience toward an inexplicable bourne.
Lives Around Us

Robert Penn Warren

All things lean at you, and some are
Trying to tell you something, though of some

The heart is too full for speech.

"Trying to Tell You Something"

Hassidic Rabbi

Every man must have two pockets, so that he can reach into one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created." And in his left: "I am earth and ashes."

Buddhist

May all sentient beings be happy. May all sentient beings be peaceful. May all sentient beings be free from suffering.

Anne Morrow Lindberg

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that-just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden. I don’t think it is anything you can give.Love is a force in you that enables you to give other things. It is the motivating power. It enables you to give strength and freedom and peace to another person. It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product; it produces. It is a power, like steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.

Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.

...

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with

the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

from Leaves of Grass

Rupert Brooke

Love is a flame;—we have beaconed the world's night.

A city:—and we have built it, these and I.

An emperor:—we have taught the world to die.

from "The Great Lover"

Joseph Wood Krutch

Sorrow is the child of Memory and of Anticipation... Sometimes it is said that Eternity must be more like Now than anything else we can imagine.

from Epilogue, The Great Chain of Life