
Final instructions to Lieutenant John Joliffe Yarnall, upon leaving the disabled Lawrence in the Battle of Lake Erie (10 September 1813)
"I've Learned Some Things" (1977)
Variant translations:
One can look at the sky for hours
One can look for hours at the sea, at a bird, at a child
Living on this world is being one with it
Growing unbreakable roots into it
Translated as "There Is One Thing I Learned From What I Lived" by Sãleyman Fatih Akgãl at TC Turkish Poetry Pages
I've Learned Some Things (2008)
Context: A person can gaze at the sky for hours
Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea
To live on the earth is to become part of it
To strike down roots that won't pull free
Final instructions to Lieutenant John Joliffe Yarnall, upon leaving the disabled Lawrence in the Battle of Lake Erie (10 September 1813)
“Lord, if what I'm doing is wrong, then by all means strike me down. Otherwise set me free.”
Source: UnWholly
“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.”
Kirilov
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation
Attributed in Princeton & Mathematics: A Notable Record, Chaplin, Virginia, Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 9, 1958 http://www.princeton.edu/~mudd/finding_aids/mathoral/pmcxpaw.htm,
Bodhi Tree lecture (1999)
Context: The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it
"As It Was Written" from Last Poems
Poems 1971-1973 (1981)
“The unconventional and uninhibited way of living was a part of my life. I won't be like that now.”
Daily Mail interview
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root”
Walden (1854)
Source: Walden, or Life in the Woods
Context: There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.<!--p.87