“And how do I know that the hate of death is not like a man who has lost his home when young and does not know where his home is to return to?”

“There is nothing more needy of criticism and worthless than general disinterest. He who does not journey does not return. He who does not have foreign experiences does not know how to organize his time and energies at home. The stay-at-home is like an archer painted on the wall: shooting continuously but never hitting anything.”

“Human-heartedness is man's mind. Righteousness is man's path. How sad that he abandons that path and does not rely on it; that he loses that mind and does not know to seek it. When a man has lost a cock or a dog, he knows to seek it, but having lost his (proper) mind, he does not know to seek it. The Way of Learning is nothing other than seeking the lost mind”

“Man, who thinks he knows everything. But what does man know...Man cares only for himself, in his fear and hate.”

“The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself, then the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.”

“There will be a lot of young men returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have seen terrible things, and who know all about the “loved and lost”, and they will be acting out their grief with reckless behaviour. When I see broken hearted young men, abusing alcohol and angry and trying to make sense of the senseless, I know and understand from my own experiences, something of what they have gone through.”