Thomas Traherne Quotes

My parents had a gardener when I was growing up, and he and I would dig in the dirt together - my mom and dad were definitely not digging with me! When I was 5, he helped me plant some corn in our backyard, and I remember how fascinating it was to watch it grow. Little did I know that 50 years later I'd be growing corn in a different way.

I raise corn and cattle and soybeans. Soybeans are a good cash crop.

Drop a grain of California gold into the ground, and there it will lie unchanged until the end of time; ... drop a grain of our blessed gold [wheat] into the ground and lo! a mystery.

Civilisation was built around wheat, around people settling down and not being nomadic. Baking is one of the oldest professions.

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.

...when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.

We never change, we never die, and we are never born.

Come with us to the field, or go with our brothers to the sea and cast your net. For the land and the sea shall be bountiful to you even as to us.

I know I am deathless…We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.

I believe what it says in the scriptures and in the Bhagavad Gita: 'Never was there a time when you did not exist, and there never will be a time when you cease to exist.'

You must get good at one of two things; planting in the spring or begging in the fall.

Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.

All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.

I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else.

Time is a lot of the things people say that God is. There's always preexisting, and having no end. There's the notion of being all powerful-because nothing can stand against time, can it? Not mountains, not armies. And time is, of course, all-healing. Give anything enough time, and everything is taken care of: all pain encompassed, all hardship erased, all loss subsumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust thou shalt return. And if time is anything akin to God, I suppose that memory must be the devil.

You have to know the reality and the reality is that we are eternal.

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.

There is no death! Death is very much like sunset. It is only an appearance. For, when the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere. In reality, the sun never sets. Likewise, death is only an illusion, an appearance. For, what is death here is birth elsewhere. For life is endless.

Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.

Rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey.

At most, you will live a hundred years on earth, but you will spend forever in eternity.

It is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time or have any relation to time. But notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal.

For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things. No, I have no desire to know what, or who I was once; or what, or who, I shall be in the ages to come. This belief in immortality makes present living the more attractive. It gives you all the time there is. You will always be able to finish what you start. There is no fever or strain in such an outlook. We are here in life for one purpose: to get experience. We are all getting it, and we shall all use it somewhere.

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I hoed it! I've dug in it! I've sprayed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!

A farmer's got to be born, same as a fool. You can't make a corn pone out of flour dough by the twistin' of it.