Humus Quotes & Sayings

There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. — Ursula K. Le Guin

We are exploring together. We are cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our hands and we are digging beneath the hard and crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives. — Parker J. Palmer

So, friends, every day do something that won't compute ... Give your approval to all you cannot understand ... Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years ... Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts ... Practice resurrection. — Wendell Berry

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus. — E.B. White

To preserve the silence within
amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens
no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky. — Dag Hammarskjold

It's all a compost heap. You just put down a layer of humus that helps other stuff grow. Your work will all be forgotten, but it will help stuff grow. — Murray Edelman

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus. — Donella Meadows

I find that a real gardener is not a man who cultivates flowers; he is a man who cultivates the soil. He is a creature who digs himself into the earth and leaves the sight of what is on it to us gaping good-for-nothings. He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden, he would sniff excitedly and say: Good Lord, what humus! — Karel Capek

Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life. — Meridel Le Sueur

You are a fertile God. Many seeds are dropped into the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose, and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do Your work in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always Your Word remains constant. Your people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability - the only security worth having. Can You not waste a little more time on us? — Michael D. O'Brien

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. — Wendell Berry

The animate earth - this moody terrain that we experience differently in anger and in joy, in grief and in love - is both the soil in which all our sciences are rooted and the rich humus into which their results ultimately return, whether as nutrients or as poisons. Our spontaneous experience of the world, charged with subjective, emotional, and intuitive content, remains the vital and dark ground of all our objectivity — David Abram

As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing? — Isabel Allende

I'll always be attached to telly in one way or another, whether it's a character or producer or director, I just love the medium. — Idris Elba

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. — Edward Abbey

My family never talks about feelings, and we certainly never talk about plutonium. It's hard to take something seriously if you can't see it, smell it, touch it, or feel it. Plutonium is a cosmic trick. The invisible enemy, the merry prankster. Can it hurt you or not? None of us know. — Kristen Iversen

Why is the forest such an effective agent in the prevention of soil erosion and in feeding
the springs and rivers? The forest does two things: (1) the trees and undergrowth break up
the rainfall into fine spray and the litter on the ground protects the soil from erosion; (2)
the residues of the trees and animal life met with in all woodlands are converted into
humus, which is then absorbed by the soil underneath, increasing its porosity and waterholding
power. The soil cover and the soil humus together prevent erosion and at the same
time store large volumes of water. These factors -- soil protection, soil porosity, and water
retention -- conferred by the living forest cover, provide the key to the solution of the soil
erosion problem." (An Agricultural Testament) — Albert Howard

Never keep a lawyer waiting. They have friends in low and infernal places. — David Weber

Had a cold hummus with pita bread,
Under a delicious food, yellow or red.
Might just have the appetite to cook
Urgent dinner by hook or crook.
So that's just a humus humor spread. — Ana Claudia Antunes

The word humility (also human) is derived from the Latin humus, meaning the soil. Perhaps this is not simply because it entails stooping and returning to earthly origins, but also because, as we are rooted in this earth of everyday life, we find in it all the vitality and fertility unnoticed by people who merely tramp on across the surface, drawn by distant landscapes. — Piero Ferrucci

The wind smelled of humus, lichen, the musky odor of pecan husks broken under the shoe, a sunshower on the fields across the bayou. But any poetry that might have been contained in that moment was lost when I stared into Honoria's face, convinced that human insanity was as close to our fingertips as the act of rubbing fog off a window pane. — James Lee Burke

It's the same sex all the time. — Robin Williams

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called, "the love of nature" seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her. — Ursula K. Le Guin

As I explore the wilderness of my own body, I see that I am made of blood and bones, sunlight and water, pesticide residues and redwood humus, the fears and dreams of generations of ancestors, particles of exploded stars. — Anne Cushman

The world is like a dropped pie most of the time. Don't kill yourself trying to put it back together. Just grab a fork and eat some of it off the floor. Then carry on. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power. — Henry Rollins

The main characteristic of Nature's farming can therefore be summed up in a few words. Mother earth never attempts to farm without live stock; she always raises mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus; there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and animals are left to protect themselves against disease. — Albert Howard

Husbands make the best kinds of heroes. - Lisa JacobsonMarriage is a mosaic you build with your spouse. Millions of tiny moments that create your love story. — Jennifer E. Smith

The word human itself comes from the same root as humus, earth. — Eben Alexander

Remember the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker. — Madeleine L'Engle

There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being. — David Whyte

The Latin words humus, soil/earth, and homo, human being, have a common derivation, from which we also get our word 'humble.' This is the Genesis origin of who we are: dust - dust that the Lord God used to make us a human being. If we cultivate a lively sense of our origin and nurture a sense of continuity with it, who knows, we may also acquire humility. — Eugene H. Peterson