I've been thinking about some things lately that have coincidentally been the subject matter of things I have read or stumbled across on a Yahoo group I am part of. (Not quotes from people on the group, that is against the rules, but rather quotes that other people have included in their posts.) And of course they are much better put this way than they could have been had I written them.

“As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”

H. D. Thoreau.
Walden

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements;lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken;it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

"Jesus did not condone; he declined to condemn; but he sent the sinner away with a solemn adjuration to a better life."

Talmage, Jesus the Christ