Quotes About Peace

Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate.

If we keep bombing other people, that creates more anger. Tensions keep escalating.

Anger is the ultimate troublemaker. I feel you can express a strong disapproval or dislike of an object without losing your temper.

Resentment and anger are not good for the soul. They are foul things.

Let tomorrow come tomorrow. Not by your will is the house carried through the night. Order is only the possibility of rest.

Those thoughts come to me in the night, those thought and thoughts of becoming sick or helpless, of the nursing home, of lingering death. I gnaw again the old bones of the fear of what is to come, and grieve with a sisterly grief over Grandmam and Mrs. Feltner and the other old women who have gone before. Finally, as a gift, as a mercy, I remember to pray, 'Thy will be done,' and then again I am free and can go to sleep.

I sat down in a chair by the bed. The house got altogether still again, and I thought he was asleep. Just ever so quietly I reached over and laid my hand on his shoulder. He said, 'I love you too, Hannah. He didn't last long after that. Death had become his friend. They say that people, if they want to, can let themselves slip away when the time comes. I think that is what Nathan did. He was not false or greedy. When the time came to go, he went.

But I would have a darkness in my mind like the dark the dead calf makes for a time on the grass where he lies, and will make in the earth as he is carried down. May all dead things lie down in me and be at peace, as in the ground.

That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of the woods, grow quiet, and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in a condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude.

I know for a while again the health of self-forgetfulness. Sabbaths 2000 V

When the mind's an empty room The clear days come.

I'm going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself. He came to me then, an old man weakened and ill, with my Nathan looking out of his eyes. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came.

It is possible, as I have learned again and again, to be in one's place, in such company, wild or domestic, and with such pleasure, that one cannot think of another place that one would prefer to be—or of another place at all. One does not miss or regret the past, or fear or long for the future. Being there is simply all, and is enough. Such times give one the chief standard and the chief reason for one's work.

make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wendell Berry

We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another-that surely would be to have life more abundantly.

Woods I part the out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent there is singing around me. Though I am dark there is vision around me. Though I am heavy there is flight around me.

The theologian William E. Hull, worrying over the destructive animosities that divide religious organizations, asked, "How can we avoid the wrangling that breeds hostility?" And he answered: "By seeking clarity rather than victory" (Beyond the Barriers, p. 169).

joy teaches him to rise, to stand and move out through the opening the light has made. He stands on the green hilltop amid the cedars, the skewed stones, the earth all opened doors… Sabbaths 2001 I

War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.

One of the best things you can do in this world is take a nap in the woods.

However interesting and lovely my days were, I could get from one day to the next only by passing through a night. I have, it is true, known lovely nights here; nights of sound sleep and good dreams and nights made wakeful by happy thoughts. but I have not always been a good sleeper, and my thoughts at night have sometimes been far from happy.

We are in the habit of contention—against the world, against each other, against ourselves. It is not from ourselves that we will learn to be better than we are.

It might prove out to be," Athey said, "that if we can't live together we can't live at all. Did you ever think about that?