Earth Being Home Quotes & Sayings

Moving forward fourteen hundred years, to sixteenth-century Europe, we hear a similar lament from the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor: "It is hard enough to marry a man . . . whom you do not know or love, and worse still to be required to leave home and kindred, and follow a stranger to the ends of the earth, without even being able to speak his language."4 — Stephanie Coontz

This earth is not our home. We are away at school, trying to master the lessons of "the great plan of happiness" so we can return home and know what it means to be there. Over and over the Lord tells us why the plan is worth our sacrifice - and His. Eve called it "the joy of our redemption." Jacob called it "that happiness which is prepared for the saints." Of necessity, the plan is full of thorns and tears - His and ours. But because He and we are so totally in this together, our being "at one" with Him in overcoming all opposition will itself bring us "incomprehensible joy." — Bruce C. Hafen

Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plentitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at your mother's breast; I wake in the desert. For me the sun shines; for you the moon and the stars. — Hermann Hesse

The last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, had paused for a final look at the black beauty of the world about him. He had a message to send home before departing. "As I take these last steps from the surface for some time in the future to come, I'd just like to record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." It's been nearly four decades since he spoke those words. No American, no earth being has yet returned to the moon. Sadly, no one will again for decades to come. — Alan Shepard

Pagan

At home
in the countryside
I make the decision
to leave your book
--overdue at the library--
face up, 'promiscuous'
out in the sun.

Pagan.

I laugh to see
this was our religion
all along.

Hidden
even from ourselves
taught
early
not to touch
the earth.

Years of white gloves
straight seamed hose.
'Being good girls.'
Scripture like chains.
Dogma like flies.
Smiles like locks
and lies. — Alice Walker

I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness. As a child, I would run away from the beatings, from the obscene words, and always knew that if I could run far enough, then any leaf, any insect, any bird, any breeze could bring me to my true home. I knew I did not belong among people. Whatever they hated about me was a human thing; the nonhuman world has always loved me. I can't remember when it was otherwise. But I have been emotionally crippled by this. There is nothing romantic about being young and angry, or even about turning that anger into art. I go through the motions of living in society, but never feel a part of it. When my family threw me away, every human on earth did likewise. — Wendy Rose

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys - — Hermann Hesse

Without holiness on earth we shall never be prepared to enjoy heaven. Heaven is a holy place. The Lord of heaven is a holy Being. The angels are holy creatures. Holiness is written on everything in heaven ... How shall we ever be at home and happy in heaven if we die unholy? — J.C. Ryle

I Am Primate

I was once taught, that I am a soul in a body.
I once believed I was separate from the earth.
A stranger in a strange land,
a sinner in need of a Savior.
But, isn't this my home? This beautiful world?
Isn't this my form?
These hands, these eyes, this touch?
Am I to believe I have violated a rule,
just by being born?
Who claims this right to judge,
and on what authority do you stand?
The truth screams out from my cells.
I am not the imagination of a God,
I am a voice in the earth,
I am that which you deny!
The earth is my home and the stars my destiny.
I will touch the planets through
the hands of my children
. . . not the will of your ghost!
I am a voice in the evolutionary continuum
and I claim the right to be alive,
without your story.
For I Am Human, I Am Proud,
and I AM . . . PRIMATE! — Christopher Zzenn Loren

In time, [a Martian] colony would grow to the point of being self- sustaining. When this stage was reached, humanity would have a precious insurance policy against catastrophe at home. During the next millennium there is a significant chance that civilization on Earth will be destroyed by an asteroid, a killer plague or a global war. A Martian colony could keep the flame of civilization and culture alive until Earth could be reverse-colonized from Mars. — Paul Davies

Was I the first boy that you had ever found in the darkness? I hurt everywhere and maybe you just didn't know how to hold me. The sincerest thing I ever said to you was that I was sorry for being. You said back to me, 'Don't be sorry for how unforgiving your life has been.' That was before the water turned to rime and the earth began to die. It happened so quickly, like a ship being lost to the sea, like a butterfly being lost to the rain. It was the ship that was meant to carry us home. It was the ship that would never make it there. — Elijah Noble El

Many people have asked me, 'How do you make a single life a happy one? My answer is, 'Create the best life possible. The decisions you make determine where life takes you. I would make every effort, married or single, to get closer to Heavenly Father, to get the most education possible, to make my home a heaven on earth, and to learn how to manage my time and finances.' I sought for and still seek for any experience I can have to make my life happier and more fulfilling; being single or married has nothing to do with it. — Kristen McMain Oaks

Consider again that dot [Earth]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. — Carl Sagan

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause "the West is the best." And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.
Alexander Supertramp, May 1992 — Christopher McCandless

We have arrived at a moment of decision. Our home-Earth-is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, of course, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings. — Al Gore

I have heard them preach, when I sat in the pew and my feet did not touch the floor, about the final home of the unconverted. In order to impress upon the children the length of time they would probably stay if they settled in that country, the preacher would frequently give us the following illustration: 'Suppose that once in a billion years a bird should come from some far-distant planet, and carry off in its little bill a grain of sand, a time would finally come when the last atom composing this earth would be carried away; and when this last atom was taken, it would not even be sun up in hell.' Think of such an infamous doctrine being taught to children! — Robert G. Ingersoll

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world. — Jack Kerouac

73Prophet, strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be tough with them. Hell is their final home - an evil destination! 74They swear by God that they did not, but they certainly did speak words of defiance and became defiant after having submitted; they tried to do something,c though they did not achieve it, - being spiteful was their only response to God and His Messenger enriching them out of His bounty. They would be better off turning back [to God]: if they turn away, God will punish them in this world and the Hereafter, and there will be no one on earth to protect or help them. — Anonymous

Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain ... and yet we're destroying the only home we have. — Jane Goodall

By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am. — James Agee

They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free - and not so that they could cast loose from Earth's terrible situation, not at all - rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act. — Kim Stanley Robinson

His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want. — C.S. Lewis

Earth," he began, ignoring the impulse to open his notes folder and count the words. He knew this lecture by heart.
"Our home. She feeds us, she shelters us. Her gravity prevents us from flying off into space and freezing, before thawing out again and being crisped by the sun, none of which really matters, as we would have long since asphyxiated." Artemis paused for laughter and was surprised when it did not arrive. "That was a little joke. I read in a presentation manual that a joke often serves to break the ice. And I actually worked icebreaking into the joke, so there were layers to my humor. — Eoin Colfer

The key question is, no matter how much you absorb of another person, can you have absorbed so much of them that when that primary brain perishes, you can feel that that person did not totally perish from the earth ... because they live on in a 'second neural home'? ... In the wake of a human being's death, what survives is a set of afterglows, some brighter and some dimmer, in the collective brains of those who were dearest to them ... Though the primary brain has been eclipsed, there is, in those who remain ... a collective corona that still glows. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone, but surrounded by indeterminate dangers, by unknown, terrible things; and the wall, which divides me from my neighbour, whom I do not know, separates me from him by as great a distance as that which separates me from the stars I see through my window. A kind of fever comes over me, a fever of pain and fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me. It is so profound, so sad, the silence of the room in which you live alone. It isn't just a silence of the body, but a silence of the soul, and, when a piece of furniture creaks, a shiver runs through your whole body, for in that dismal place you expect to hear no sound. — Guy De Maupassant

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground. Everything inanimate - stones, iron - was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter. — Vasily Grossman

Time, my brothers and sisters, seems to be running out; we are not yet tearing one another apart, but we are tearing apart our common home. Today, the scientific community realizes what the poor have long told us: harm, perhaps irreversible harm, is being done to the ecosystem. The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called "the dung of the devil". An unfettered pursuit of money rules. The service of the common good is left behind. Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home. — Pope Francis

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts. — Jeanette Winterson

Other things being roughly equal, that man lives most keenly who lives in closest harmony with nature. To be wholly alive a man must know storms, he must feel the ocean as his home or the air as his habitation. He must smell the things of earth, hear the sounds of living things and taste the rich abundance of the soil and sea. — James A. Michener

We are going home (we are Home, already and always). Home on this earth is being all levels of our awareness or consciousness in our own unique fashion. (138) — Charles L. Whitfield

The thing she loved most about being Jewish was that you could step into a synagogue anywhere on earth and feel like you'd come home. India, Brazil, New Zealand, even Mars - if you could rely on Shalom, Spacemen!, the homemade comic book that had been the highlight of Simon's third-grade Hebrew school experience. — Cassandra Clare

The inner life is bruised by a running against the laws of the Kingdom. The bruises are guilt complexes, a sense of inferiority, of missing the mark, of being out of harmony with God and with oneself, a sense of wrongness. Divine forgiveness wipes out all that sense of inner hurt and condemnation. Brings a sense of at-homeness- at home with God and oneself and with life. The universe opens its arms and takes one in. You are accepted- by God, by yourself, and by life. All self-loathing, self-rejection, all inferiorities drop away. You are a child of God; born from above, you walk the earth, a conqueror, afraid of nothing. Healed at the heart, you can say to life: Come on, I'm ready for anything. — E. Stanley Jones

I thought I'd love to be a gardener because I grew up with a vegetable garden and I love being close to the Earth and growing things. At my home in L.A., I have a great garden and I grow all kinds of things. I even have a worm farm! The worms help create organic compost out of kitchen scraps. — Curtis Stone

And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won't be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumbering where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breathe. Then, with other thoughts, I will walk along streets like these, and listen to streams, and overhear what the sky says in the evening, over and over and over. — Hermann Hesse

God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humbles mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise ... it [is] the the intimacy with which his eye rests upon the scene. It [is] his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth ... And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.
When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glisttering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit ... Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated. — Henry Miller

Remember what your grandfather said about the earth's being round at school and flat at home. He was a wise man and taught you what you need to know in Burma. It is the same in politics. Learn the arguments for socialism in the textbooks parrot them pass your exams. Never never argue. But keep within your own head and heart what you and everyone really knows that in the real world it is a system of incompetence and corruption and a project for ruining the country. — Pascal Khoo Thwe

The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the forest and worked for us. They lived with us as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own. — Eknath Easwaran

I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that? — David Foster Wallace

We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces. We inhabit singledom as our natural resting state ... Secretly, we are romantics, romantics of the highest order. We want a miracle. Out of millions we have to find the one who will understand. For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date, we dream of going home to watch television. We would prfer to be alone with our own thoughts than with a less than perfect fit ... but when the quirkyalone collides with another, ooh la la. The earth quakes. — Sasha Cagen

All I know is that after 10 years of being sober, with huge support to express my pain and anger and shadow, the grief and tears didn't wash me away. They gave me my life back! They cleansed me, baptized me, hydrated the earth at my feet. They brought me home, to me, to the truth of me. — Anne Lamott

If we can choose where to cry, at home or with a few people who will be fully understanding, perhaps we will feel easier. But if we can't - if we are in church and a hymn catches us off guard, or at a football game and we remember being there with a son or daughter now gone - well, the earth is our home and we can cry where we want. — Martha Whitmore Hickman

The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He's just a businessman as is right and proper. - -J.N. NESTROY, Hollenangst — Clive Barker

When the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! If I leave my hair in the comb in my mother's house & walk out the door to go to the airport, then all of a sudden the body is everything between me & that lost piece. The body is made up, then, of roads & crickets & azucena & mud. How large we are. How ramshackle, how brilliant, how haphazardly & strangely rendered we are. Gloriously, fantastically mixed & monstered. I have been asking myself to be more attentive & porous - to pay attention to the way every inch of me is animal, every inch of me is earth. — Aracelis Girmay

And then he was kissing her, and she was struck by his nearness, his solidity, his smell. It was of the garden and the earth and the sun. When Cassandra opened her eyes, she realized she was crying. She wasn't sad, though, these were the tears of being found, of having come home after a long time away. — Kate Morton

If the well-being of my loved place depends on the well-being of Earth, I have a good reason for supporting the well-being of your loved place. I have selfish as well as cosmopolitan reasons for preserving the home-places of all human beings. Cosmopolitanism becomes thicker and more potent with this realization. — Nel Noddings

Mother Earth, one of my absolute favorite places ... where the sounds, the energy, the beauty and the Life pounds into your every fiber of being, letting you Know that you are alive. I will always respect and honor this gift of creation that we call our home. — Peace Gypsy