Earth Quotes

“The strangest thing I've found is that when I got to space, I felt more comfortable in space that I've ever been on Earth before. I just felt this is my home.”

“Heaven is on this earth. There are no angels on the clouds with twanging harps... That's just another man's fantasy.”

“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.”

“No construct on earth will stand, that does not stand for the least among them, as their advocate and humble servant.”

“True poetry is the perception of human feelings, the voice of the heart, open or hidden. It is the lyrics, compositions, and melody of the relation between humankind, the universe and God, a shadow pinpointing each of the truths we can discern everywhere (from the earth to the stars), a photograph of the creation’s projection cast in our feelings and thoughts and framed through words, a heartfelt tune of our loves and joys played on different strings, and it is a bouquet of our faith, hope, determination, beauty, love, reunion, and yearnings.”

“The truth is that I'm a very down-to-earth person. I've been called a brat but that's an insult to my parents. They didn't raise a brat. I'm not an immature, insensitive person.”

“We are in the school [or mortality] and keep learning and we do not expect to cease learning while we live on earth; and when we pass through the veil, we expect still to continue to learn and increase our fund of information.”

“The name of the Lord Jesus, and His Word is powerful as the two edged sword that can cut through the face of the earth and bring man to subjection to His Kingdom which is pregnant to be established. The pains of labour is being felt and will intensify in the years to come and the moment will come for us to meet our Bridegroom Christ Himself.”

“If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies;If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster;If you embrace nonviolence but are not a vegan, then words of nonviolence come out of your mouth as the products of torture and death go into it;If you claim to love animals but you are eating them or products made from them, or otherwise consuming them, you see loving as consistent with harming that which you claim to love.Stop trying to make excuses. There are no good ones to make. Go vegan.”

“Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoningof the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrainedmaterial production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasiveevil to have emerged in all of history, and it may eveneventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no "twisted" peoplewhom we can hold responsible for this.”

“Titan is the one place in our solar system whose geographical and atmospheric diversity and complexity are rivaled only by the Earth's. It's very Earth-like, but it's also very different, which means we have a lot to learn as well as a prayer of understanding what we find.”

“And the centurion who stood by said: Truly this was a son of God. Not long ago but everywhere I go There is a hill and a black windy sky. Portent of hill, sky, day's eclipse I know; Hill, sky, the shuddering darkness, these am I. The dying at His right hand, at His left, I am - the thief redeemed and the lost thief; I am the careless folk; I those bereft, The Well-Belov'd, the women bowed in grief. The gathering Presence that in terror cried, In earth's shock in the Temple's veil rent through, I; and a watcher, ignorant, curious-eyed, I the centurion who heard and knew”

“You can work all your life and make all the waters in all the rivers on Earth drinkable, but if, when you die, you are not ready to meet God, it doesn't matter.”

“There's a picture that exists on the Earth of me meeting Sir Paul McCartney and Jon Bon Jovi at the same time... that was the one that was like, 'get out of here man!'”

“A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.”

“When the time comes for you to leave this earth, if it doesn’t become a lesser place with your absence, then you have wasted your life.”

“Because," explained Mary Rommely simply, "the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination. I, myself, even in this day and at my age, have great need of recalling the miraculous lives of the Saints and the great miracles that have come to pass on earth. Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”

“I have a dream: That everyone may experience a heaven on earth by their own whim.”

“I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you.As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me.Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat.I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb.Scent and taste disappear.The only thing about my body that works is my eyes,and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect.And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home,but it will never be the home I left behind.”

“How bittersweet is it to realize that we are the creators of our realities and that we have allowed others to do the creating for us for so many years? So much time wasted…so much guilt, regret and bitterness. It can be easier to numb that pain than face it. Yet once we face our pain and take responsibility, we gain the freedom to move forward and unleash our Divine Potential. We also gain the freedom to move forward and respond to life with Divinity; thus, we alter the very fabric of the collective realities experienced on our planet.”