Favorite Quotes

"I went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."  

- John Muir

"There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail knowing that everything you need is on your back.  It is a confidence in having left all inessentials behind, and of entering a world of natural beauty which has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a deadweight."  

- Paul Theroux (The Happy Isles of Oceana: Paddling the Pacific)

"Walk-about acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his true self.  What's intriguing about walkabout is that there's no physicial goal:  It simply continues until one becomes whole again."  

- Rolf Potts (Vagabonding)

"He denounced the 'money madness' that had distorted the country's judgement and corrupted it's virtue, taking possession of people's heads so that they could not think clearly about the ends of life or accept any restraint on their appetite...He tried to lead his fellow citizens toward new ideas and values in their personal lives that could contain that widespread materialistic virus.  He taught them to cultivate leisure instead of work."

"He wanted to free others, and free himself, from the kind of workaholic temperament that he had seen in his father or on the Indianapolis factory floor.  All his adult life he had been seeking a new era devoted to deliberate health and spirit-enhancing leisure in the presence of nature."

"Saving the American soul from a total surrender to materialism was the cause for which he fought.  The Sierra Nevada had been his fist and would be his last stand."

"He would live among trees and flowers, weather in this country or another did not matter much, as a pilgrim seeking an independant relation to society but dependent on the universe"

- Donald Worster (A Passion for Nature:  The Life of John Muir)

"You don't choose a life, Dad.  You live one."  

 - Emilio Estevez's character in the movie,  "The Way"

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth."  

- Henry David Thoreau

"The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun." 

 - Emille Hirch's character in "Into The Wild"

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat." 

- Theodore Roosevelt 

     "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity..."

- John Muir