About the hill lay other islands small, Where other rocks, crags, cliffs, and mountains stood, The Isles Fortunate these elder time did call, To which high Heaven they reigned so kind and good, And of his blessings rich so liberal, That without tillage earth gives corn for food, And grapes that swell with sweet and precious wine There without pruning yields the fertile vine.The olive fat there ever buds and flowers, The honey-drops from hollow oaks distil, The falling brook her silver streams downpours With gentle murmur from their native hill, The western blast tempereth with dews and showers The sunny rays, lest heat the blossoms kill, The fields Elysian, as fond heathen sain, Were there, where souls of men in bliss remain.
Torquato TassoRelated topics
blast bliss brook call corn earth elder elysian falling fat fond food fortunate gentle gives good heat heathen heaven high hill hollow men kill kind lay lest liberal murmur native olive precious pruning remain rich silver small stand sunny sweet swell tillage time vine western wine cliffs fields oaks rocksRelated quotes
In the fall, acorns, filberts, and hickory nuts are gathered by wildlife as winter stores. Field and pack rats bring in smaller seed such as wild rice from the marshes. If storages are provided, these foragers will fill hollow pipes or logs, or smaller pipes, old vehicle engine manifolds, and nest boxes or wall cavities. Seed so collected is sound, clean, and neatly stored. Providing some 15% is left, and given over to winter food for these workers, 85% can be collected for human use. A few people regularly collect their hickory nuts or wild rice in this way, by providing dens for squirrels or pack rats. It is a question of cooperation and provision for others, instead of attempting to kill off the experts and do the job yourself.
Bill Mollison
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.
Willa Cather
Because wisdom in action in our Western democracies rests squarely upon public understanding, I have long believed that our schools have a key role to play. Peace could, I believe, be advanced through careful study of all the factors which have gone into the various incidents now historical that have marked the breakdown of peace in the past. As an initial procedure our schools, at least our colleges but preferably our senior high schools, as we call them, should have courses which not merely instruct our budding citizens in the historical sequence of events of the past, but which treat with almost scientific accuracy the circumstances which have marked the breakdown of peace and have led to the disruption of life and the horrors of war.
George C. Marshall
Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things. The Sun shone on it; the vicissitude of seasons and human fortunes. Cloth was woven and worn; ditches were dug, furrowfields ploughed, and houses built. Day by day all men and cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to their several lairs. In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived nations of breathing men; alternating, in all ways, between Light and Dark; between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil, between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very Hell. Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all!
Thomas Carlyle
In no particular order, I could not or would not exist without air, food, water, gravity, tides, the moon, the sun, night, civilization, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, the law of the land, ancestors having sex, DNA, viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, oceans, ice caps, the kindness of strangers, the Big Bang, familial bonds, smart people, brave people, memory, medicine, the periodic table of elements, tribal instincts, magnetic fields, weather, Earth's molten core, a rotating Earth, a tilted Earth, tectonic plates, sleep, death, heat, consciousness, evolution, teachers and the miraculous, self-regulating chemical factory that is my body. Other than that, I like to think of myself as a self-made man.
Chuck Lorre
