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


"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.  Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.  Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.  They somehow know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary." 

- Steve Jobs


"When someone is searching, then it might easily happen that the only thing his eyes still see is that what he searches for, that he is unable to find anything, to let anything enter his mind, because he is always thinking of nothing but the object of his search, because he has a goal.  But finding means:  being free, being open, having no goal."

- Herman Hess in "Siddhartha"


"...everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me."

- Herman Hess in "Siddhartha"

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” 

- George Bernard Shaw

"Pushing into the fear so far that you push through it is the best
way to make a huge leap. On the other side is a new land where everything that scared you before seems like a piece of cake."

-Anonymous

"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

-Mark Twain