David Orr > Quotes

“Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.”
― David Orr

“Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.”
― David Orr

“It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants”
― David Orr

“it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium”
― David Orr, Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry

“There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to run for Congress.’ I’ve never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart.” They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on “courage”—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, “all the difference.”
― David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong

“Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.”
― David Orr

“We do not organize education the way we see the world. If we did, we would have departments of Sky, Landscapes, Water, Wind, Sounds, Time Seashores, Swamps, and Rivers.”
― David Orr

“A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.”
― David Orr

“It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.”
― David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong