When Keats, walking in the rose garden, saw the ground under the bushes all covered with pink petals, he exclaimed; "Next year the roses should be very red!" When Aeneas tore the bough from the myrtle tree, Virgil says the tree exuded blood.

But this is only a poet's way of saying that civilization is a tree that is nourished, not by rain and snow, but by the tears and blood of the patriots and prophets of yesterday.
Fortunately, in manifold ways, nature and life witness to the universality of vicarious service and suffering.

Indeed, the very basis of the doctrine of evolution is the fact that the life of the higher rests upon the death of the lower.

The astronomers tell us that the sun ripens our harvests by burning itself up.

Each golden sheaf, each orange bough, each bunch of figs, costs the sun thousands of tons of carbon.