“We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.”

“Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!”

“When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.”

“And as the wary dogs skirt past, we nod, grimace, and resume our paths to separate destinies and graves.”

“The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.”

“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”

“Webster said, ''Time them skeeters get done with that old man, his French blood will be all gone and he will speak American as good as we do.”