Richard Wilbur Quotes

The natural world is a package deal; you don't get to select which facts you like and which you don't.

Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.

The best way to navigate through life is to give up all of our controls.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

One of the things I noticed in my career that gave me a lot of happiness early on was realising we don't have any control.

I'm not in control of my fate, and that's a good thing.

No one is immortal. Don't worry too much about your life. Just sing your song... and go.

I realized the world spins without me having to spin it.

Everyone is allowed to be vulnerable. I think women and men and dogs and cats and ants and aliens can all express themselves and be vulnerable.

The world's a rollercoaster and I am not strapped in. Maybe I should hold with care, but my hands are busy in the air.

For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.

yes is a world & in this world of yes live (skilfully curled) all worlds

If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?

You don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

SONG You bound strong sandals on my feet, You gave me bread and wine, And sent me under sun and stars, For all the world was mine. Oh, take the sandals off my feet, You know not what you do, For all my world is in your arms, My sun and stars are you.

I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person's - or the next fish's, or the next grass-blade's! - and not a whit less.

All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?

... the song of the world is all of love.

Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not natural. Each keeps its own place.

I went from staring at the same four walls for 21 years to seeing the whole world in just 12 months.

We are creatures like everything else in our world.

Even the song of birds, which we can bring under no musical rule, seems to have more freedom, and therefore more for taste, than a song of a human being which is produced in accordance with all the rules of music; for we very much sooner weary of the latter, if it is repeated often and at length. Here, however, we probably confuse our participation in the mirth of a little creature that we love, with the beauty of its song; for if this were exactly imitated by man (as sometimes the notes of the nightingale are) it would seem to our ear quite devoid of taste.

...the world she ran through loved her and would give her what she wanted and would let it happen.