The Northern Farm Quotes

“Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars?”
― Henry Beston, The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“An old farm is always more than the people under its roof. It is the past as well as the present, and vanished generations have built themselves into it as well as left their footsteps in the worn woodwork of the stair.”
― Henry Beston, The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“Winter farewell, winter farewell, and away you go and trouble us no more.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.”
― Henry Beston, The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“I muse again on the dogmatic assertion which I often make that the countryman's relation to Nature must never be anything else but an alliance... When we begin to consider Nature as something to be robbed greedily like an unguarded treasure, or used as an enemy, we put ourselves in thought outside of Nature, of which we are inescapably a part.”
― Henry Beston, The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“It is enough to say that prophets of expediency who are careless of the means they use and who work outside the human and moral values, have never been able to build anything humanly worth while.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“The city has its heat and cold, its hunger and its thirst, but it has lost a great measure of the human birthright of physical sensation. Life there is so protected from Nature, so insulated, so to speak, that it ends up by being only a ghost of the human adventure. I say this because it has always seemed to me that a normal range of physical sensation, a sense, for instance, of the fabric of earth underfoot and the sudden cold of a change of the wind, is not only a part of the discipline of life but also of its reward.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“There is only one test of any political scheme or adventure in government. It is the quality of the human being produced by the political order and by the way of life occasioned by that order.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

“sharpened and the house will have an odd little way of opening doors by itself and leaning to one side.”
― Henry Beston, Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm