William Steig Quotes

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .

The fields and the flowers and the beautiful faces are not ours, as the stars and the hills and the sunlight are not ours, but they give us fresh and happy thoughts.

The older I grow the more do I love spring and spring flowers. Is it so with you?

No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life...Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: Their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light.

having someone think of me that way was like discovering a new window in the room i'd lived in all my life.

When we see a beautiful object, a beautiful garden, or a beautiful flower, let us think that there we behold a ray of the infinite beauty of God, who has given existence to that object.

Never an illness, nor the absence of grandeur, no, nothing is able to kill the best in us, that kindness, dear sir, we are afflicted with: beautiful is the flower of man, his conduct, and every door opens on the beautiful truth and never hides treacherous whispers. I always gained something from making myself better, better than I am, better than I was, that most subtle citation: to recover some lost petal of the sadness I inherited: to search once more for the light that sings inside of me, the unwavering light.

I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place.

She returned his gaze, struck by the sense of her own transformation, and overwhelmed by the beauty which a lifetime havit had taught her to ignore.

Today, look at the blue sky, hear the grass growing beneath your feet, inhale the scent of spring, let the fruits of the earth linger on your tongue, reach out and embrace those you love. Ask Spirit to awaken your awareness to the sacredness of your sensory perceptions.

He just stood there, looking at me, as if I had actually changed before his eyes. But this was the girl I'd been all along. I'd just hidden her well.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

If you take any flower you please and look it over and turn it about and smell it and feel it and try to find out all its little secrets, not of flower only but of leaf, bud and stem as well, you will discover many wonderful things. This is how you make friends with plants, and very good friends you will find them to the end of our lives.

If the earth is man's extended body, to be loved and respected as one's own body, those who do no greening of themselves will hardly bring about the greening of America. The idea of 'greening' involves color, flowering, freshness of spring, and, above all, respect for what is organic and vegetative as distinct from the mechanical and metallic.

Like the lotus flower that is born out of mud, we must honor the darkest parts of ourselves and the most painful of our life’s experiences, because they are what allow us to birth our most beautiful self.

I would go to the beach in my turtle neck, all bundle up. I would read my book and kind of scowl, but I hadn't seen the most beautiful beaches in the world. We had a beach (in Canada) where you couldn't even go swimming. But once I travelled and saw more beautiful areas, my relationship to the planet expanded I started connect to it more and be more aware.

I've been in those relationships. You go through years of your life and at a certain point you wake up and you go, god, what am I doing here? What have I spent the last three years doing? Part of it is learning, this process you've gotta go through. You have to recognize the point at which you're not learning anymore, and be able to let it go.

Think of the mystical three days between the crucifixion and the resurrection as the time it takes for a situation to change once spirit has infused our consciousness. As we come to look at an experience differently, in time in begins to transform.

I was very focused, driven, rigid, work-oriented. I didn't care about having a family or making a home. I didn't think about kids. It's not that I didn't want those things, I just didn't think about them. And then I had someone who came in as a tornado, this creative, beautiful ball of insane energy and passion. And it completely opened me up.

YOUR HEART IS FULL of fertile seeds, waiting to sprout. Just as a lotus flower springs from the mire to bloom splendidly, the interaction of the cosmic breath causes the flower of the spirit to bloom and bear fruit in this world.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled after a night of rain. I dip my cupped hands. I drink a long time. It tastes like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them deep inside me, whispering oh what is that beautiful thing that just happened?

Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.