Henry Beston Quotes

The leaves fall, the wind blows, and the farm country slowly changes from the summer cottons into its winter woods."

Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?

Wolves are not our brothers; they are not our subordinates, either. They are another nation, caught up just like us in the complex web of time and life.

Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live.

Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honor the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth's and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.

I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in a stream of stars - pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across the eternal seas of space and time

Do no dishonour to the earth least you dishonour the spirit of man.