Skills and Craft ~ Gene Logsdon

“Sustainable farms are to today's headlong rush toward global destruction what the monasteries were to the Dark Ages: places to preserve human skills and crafts until some semblance of common sense and common purpose returns to the public mind.”

~ Gene Logsdon

More at https://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/

Artwork from Sybil Andrews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_Andrews

Two Steps from the Dirt ~ Kristin Kimball

"Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.” 

~ Kristin Kimball

More at (in fact so much more, Kristin and Mark's blog is outstanding)
http://www.kristinkimball.com/blog/

Artwork from Stephen Alcorn http://www.alcorngallery.com/

That's Rough ~ Maya Angelou

“It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.” 

~ Maya Angelou

More at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Angelou

Artwork from Balas Volodymyr http://www.eudusa.org/index.php?title=Balas_Volodymyr

A Piece of Land ~ John Seymour

The 'owner' of a piece of land has an enormous responsibility, whether the piece is large or small. The very word 'owner' is a misnomer when applied to land. The robin that hops about your garden, and the worms that he hunts, are, in their own terms, just as much 'owners' of the land they occupy as you are. 'Trustee' would be a better word. Anyone who comes into possession, in human terms, of a piece of land, should look upon himself or herself as the trustee of that piece of land - the 'husbandman' - responsible for increasing the sum of things living on that land, holding the land just as much for the benefit of the robin, the wren and the earthworm, even the bacteria in the soil, as for himself."

~ John Seymour

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seymour_(author)

Artwork from Sally Seymour http://carninglipress.co.uk/biography-sally-seymour.php

Way of Living ~ Madeleine L'Engle

“But unless we are creators we are not fully alive. What do I mean by creators? Not only artists, whose acts of creation are the obvious ones of working with paint of clay or words. Creativity is a way of living life, no matter our vocation or how we earn our living. Creativity is not limited to the arts, or having some kind of important career.” 

~ Madeleine L'Engle

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_L%27Engle

Artwork from Jeremy Sancha http://www.centralillustration.com/illustrators/jeremy-sancha

All the Time There is ~ Arnold Bennett

"Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food? Which of us is not saying to himself — which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is."

~ Arnold Bennett

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Bennett

Artwork by Charles W. Hobson
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Advertising_Material_Designed_by_Charles.html?id=LTHWSAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Plain and Functional ~ J.D. Belanger

"It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional."

~ J.D. Belanger

More at
 http://www.homesteadingtoday.com/general-homesteading-forums/homesteading-questions/256632-my-visit-j-d-bellanger.html

Artwork from Mark Herald  http://www.stjudesprints.co.uk/collections/mark-hearld

Appropriate Boldness ~ Gary Snyder

"Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness."

~  Gary Snyder

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder

Artwork from Cath Read http://www.cathread.co.uk/

Self-Renewal ~ Boris Pasternak

“Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.” 

~ Boris Pasternak

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak

Artwork from Anthony Russo http://www.russoart.com/bio/

Making Puddings ~ Charlotte Brontë

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”

~ Charlotte Brontë

More at ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB

Artwork from Fritz Eichenberg ~  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Eichenberg

That Kind of Thing ~ Rhoda Janzen

“When you're young, faith is often a matter of rules. What you should do and shouldn't do, that kind of thing. But as you get older, you realize that faith is really a matter of relationship - with God, with the people around you, with the members of your community.”

~  Rhoda Janzen

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoda_Janzen

Artwork from Don Swartzentruber
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Swartzentruber