Quotes About Harmony

Really, Dad. I understand now about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic.

It's that way with people, too. Only with people it's sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

painting is more than the sum of its parts," he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you've got magic. I

chaos is a necessary step in the organization of one's universe

I told about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. It's that way with people, too, he said, only with people it's sometimes that the whole is less than the sum of the parts.

I could die in peace, I think, if the world was beautiful. To know it's being ruined is hard.

We walked always in beauty, it seemed to me. We walked and looked about, or stood and looked. Sometimes, less often, we would sit down. We did not often speak. The place spoke for us and was a kind of speech. We spoke to each other in the things we saw.

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

A man with a machine and inadequate culture is a pestilence.

The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being.

He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.

Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.

Now when he walked in his fields and pastures and woodlands he was tramping into his mind the shape of the land, his thought becoming indistinguishable from it, so that when he came to die his intelligence would subside into it like its own spirit.

it charms mere eyesight to believe The nearest thing not trees Is the sky, into which The trees reach, opening their luminous new leaves… and thought finds rest beneath a brightened tree In which, unseen, a warbler feeds and sings. His song's Small shapely melody Comes down irregularly, as all light's givings come." Sabbaths 1999 III

The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer...the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; ...

I loved the different voices all singing one song, the various tones and qualities, the passing lifts of feeling, rising up and going out forever. Old Man Profet, who was a different man on Sunday, used to draw out the notes at the ends of verses so he could listen to himself, and in fact it sounded pretty.

Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

Theology, therefore, is the exhibition of the facts of Scripture in their proper order and relation, with the principles or general truths involved in the facts themselves, and which pervade and harmonize the whole.

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

The irony is, if we divide ourselves for our own comfort, no one will have comfort.