farming
I have confidence in the laws of morals as of botany. I have planted maize in my field every June for seventeen years and I never knew it come up strychnine. My parsley, beet, turnip, carrot, buck-thorn, chestnut, acorn, are as sure. I believe that justice produces justice, and injustice injustice.
1852 journal entry, in Emerson in Concord (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889), 79.
One thing we do know, that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with much less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.
“People, Land, and Community,” in The Art of the Commonplace (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2002), 183.
It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crop.
Adam Bede (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1860), 173.