Imogene Lake, Sawtooth Wilderness, Idaho
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More Quotes
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"Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you."
- Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher and author of Tao Te Ching.
"... even on the Pacific Crest Trail food is generally abundant but inspiration is scarce and is something to be cherished. May you be blessed with inspiration."
- Bronka Sundstrom, Holocaust survivor, avid hiker and mountaineer who was, in 2002, the oldest woman to summit Mt. Rainier at age 77. She died 11/29/23 at age 98.
"As the crickets' soft autumn hum
is to us
So are we to the trees
As are they
To the rocks and the hills."
- Gary Snyder
"In sublimity - the superlative degree of beauty -
What land can equal the desert?"
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us of what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."
- Terry Tempest Williams, American author and conservationist
“When one of us says, “Look, there's nothing out there,” what we are really saying is, “I cannot see.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
"As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"On the plains, in the mountains, you learn that you are as important as the beaver, the hawk, the dragonfly - but not more so. You are part of the circle.
- Gaydell Collier
"It doesn't have to be fun to be fun."
- Barry Blanchard, alpinist
"Nature and I are two."
- Woody Allen
"Why do they say we’re over the hill? I don’t even know what that means and why it’s a bad thing. When I go hiking and I get over the hill, that means I’m past the hard part and there’s a snack in my future."
- Ellen DeGeneres
"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done."
- Rocky Balboa, character in "Rocky" movies, played by Sylvester Stallone.
"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
- John Steinbeck
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
- Rachel Carson, marine biologist, author and conservationist
"In the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."
- Jack Kerouac
From a Boise Crossfit Instagram post:
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?" - Epictetus
Cut out processed foods now. Get in a workout today. Turn off the t.v. and go outside. Call a loved one on your drive home from work. Go to bed earlier tonight. Stop waiting - demand better!
"Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death."
- Pascal, "Pensees"
"Change happens through movement and movement heals."
- Joseph Pilates, inventor of the Pilates Method for physical fitness
"The love of mountains is best."
- inscription carved in Greek, found on a summit rock in the Alps by an adventurer in 1558.
"Beauty is the illumination of your soul."
- John O'Donohue, Irish poet, priest, and Hegelian philosopher
"I never knew a man who felt self-important in the morning after spending the night in the open on an Idaho mountainside under a star-studded summer sky."
- Frank Church, former U.S. Senator from Idaho
" It is the strong in body who is both the strong and free in mind."
- Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's father)
"What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web."
- David Abram, philosopher, author of Spell of the Sensuous, and Becoming Animal
Find tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stone, and
good in everything.
- William Shakespeare
"The real blessings of life are not the fictions generally supposed, but are real, and are mostly within reach of all."
- Walt Whitman
"The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but the complexity of the land organism. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?"
- Aldo Leopold
"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it."
- Andy Rooney
"No matter how simple, stark, or barren an ecological world seems, be prepared to have it baffle your best efforts. Never underestimate life."
- Stephen Trimble, from The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin.
"The true pleasure in life comes from meeting challenges in whatever form they present themselves."
- Patricia Ordoobadi
"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."
- Albert Einstein
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest . . . a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein
"I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence."
- Marilynne Robinson, novelist - winner of 2005 Pulitzer prize for novel Gilead
"The worst thing is to doubt what the Earth wants."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Perhaps it isn't will at all that fuels a person to the top of a mountain. Perhaps it is the ache for beauty. A desire to be dangled over the canyon of nothingness. To, in fact, lose one's will for a moment.
Perhaps climbing a mountain is nothing more than an act of worship, and reaching the barren perch of a summit is to experience pure awe."
-Lucy Jane Bledsoe, The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic
"Over everything is the desert silence. You don't have to go far from the road to hear it. It is a prevailing, enormous, patient silence, not even dented by the small sounds that occur in it. It is primordial, here before the beginning. The world occurs in it."
- Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
"If ever a man was permitted to receive and enjoy some blessings that might alleviate the many sorrows to which he is exposed, it is certainly in the country, when he attentively considers those ravishing scenes with which he is everywhere surrounded."
- Jean de Crevecoeur, Letter II from an American Farmer
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
- Ernest Hemingway
"I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it's never done."
- Ernest Hemingway
"There is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them."
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
". . . we fail to realize how special our ordinary world really is. We come to national parks and other preserves primed for appreciation yet disdain the fat, maroon caterpillars on the pipevine in the alley or the mockingbird on the clothesline with an earwig in its bill. Thoreau said, 'I had no idea there was so much going on in Heywood's meadow.' Heywood's meadow is all around us."
Janice Emily Bowers, The Mountains Next Door
"The more one looks, the more (magically) there is to see. There can be no end to esthetic discovery in this land, because artistic stimuli are as omnipresent here as they are likely to be anywhere, with respect at least to inorganic art. The landscape here is one of idealized, archetypal forms: an intricate natural mosaic of surprise, expectation, anticipation, and excitement."
- Ward J. Roylance - The Enchanted Wilderness (his writings about the land in Southern Utah)
"The primary task of the human is a recognition of the Beauty in which we find ourselves."
- Thomas Berry
"To the Earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the Earth will not miss us . . . Let's be clear: The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."
- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
“The shadows of foliage, the drift of clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound of running waters – all the gentler qualities of nature that minor poets love to juggle with – are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh, and at first repellant. But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation! And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies."
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
"The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellant - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agoraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently."
- Edward Abbey, The Journey Home
"To know the Canyon is to love it? Not necessarily. Crawling up the Tanner Trail some moonlight night in August, without food or water, you will hate the Canyon. Bitterly. That pale rim so far above, higher than five Empire State Buildings piled one upon another, seems inaccessible as Heaven, remote as salvation. But if you survive . . . Who could ask for a finer place than our Canyon in which to taste life deeply by risking life? By hanging it over the edge?
- Edward Abbey referring to the Grand Canyon, from Down the River
"In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug-bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelming sense of freedom I know nowhere else."
- Ann Zwinger, Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
"Nature, time, and patience are the three best physicians."
- Ann Zwinger - The Art of Wandering in The Nearsighted Naturalist
"As long as you are making images, you are living the dream."
- Michael Kadillak, photographer
"But the Parthenon serves no useful purpose, either; if we tore it down we could erect buildings to shelter an inadequately housed population....And yet man, if he took the trouble, could rebuild the Parthenon ten times over. But he will never be able to recreate a single canyon, which was formed during thousands of years of patient erosion by sun, wind and water...."
- Jean Dorst, Before Nature Dies
"Even though age diminishes our physical capacities, it will happen even faster if we don't test ourselves. How else would you find out how much you could do?"
- Mike Carlson, Five-time Race to Robie Creek Champion
"Being fit makes everything in life more enjoyable."
- Doug Traubel
"It's a tough road that leads to heights of greatness."
- Seneca
"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
- Leonardo Da Vinci
"For in truth, art is implicit in nature, and whoever can extract it has it."
- Albrecht Durer, German painter and printmaker, German Renaissance theorist
"The joy of Nature is older than the joy of man."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Heaven is beneath our feet as well as above our heads.
- Henry David Thoreau
"I wish to speak a word for Nature,
for absolute freedom and wilderness."
- Henry David Thoreau
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
"We need the tonic of wildness...we can never have enough nature."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"The society we have created puts us in constant danger lest we ultimately find ourselves unable to direct the more and more complicated apparatus we have devised."
- Joseph Wood Krutch, Wilderness as More than a Tonic
"Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"Not to have known - as most men have not - either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one's self. Not to have known one's self is to have known no one."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy."
- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
"O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds,
as one with them."
- Walt Whitman
“Today I remember blessings from the land and sky. I was searching when I turned to the land, but not for what I found. The land and sky gave me gifts, and along the way I found what I was looking for.”
- Patty Litzel, “Gifts from the Sky”, Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West
"Freedom lies in being bold."
- Robert Frost
"We jounce over the crested wheat grass, sweating and silent, each of us glancing over the Badlands to the east. The land seems to ripple with heat waves. If I half-close my eyes, I can't see the fences or the distant electric towers; the land beyond the puny strip plowed by the homesteaders disappears into the distance. I can see the earth stretch, flex its muscles. Fence wires tighten, hum, snap and disappear. The earth lies under the sun as it did ten thousand years ago - clean, ready for the buffalo's track and the human footprint."
- Linda Hasselstrom, Going Over East - Reflections of a Woman Rancher
"I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass..."
- Willa Cather, My Antonia
"During summer's dry heat, I have heard: 'I ain't had no rain on me since May. There ain't enough grass on me to feed a bird.' And, 'If I don't get rain on me pretty soon, I'm going to blow away.' These ranchers referred to their land in the most intimate terms possible."
- Linda Hasselstrom, Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
"I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found."
- John Haines
"The view from San Jacinto is the most sublime spectacle to be found anywhere on this earth!"
- John Muir
"Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul."
- John Muir
"Keep close to Nature's heart and break clear, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
- John Muir
"Now he walks in quiet solitude, the forest and the streams
seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
the serenity of a clear blue mountain lake."
- John Denver, from his song Rocky Mountain High
" My father used to say that it's never too late to do anything you want to do."
-Michael Jordan
"You must expect great things from yourself before you can do them."
- Michael Jordan
"I have written many words about this canyon and mountain and the pure physical descriptions always fall short, weak bloopers that never make it out of the literary infield. If you want to understand the character of this mountain you first have to go there with boots and backpack (watch for rattlers), and let it bloody you up some - and then you should go home and listen to the last five piano sonatas of Beethoven, because there the mountain's craggy attitude, indomitable will, and presence in the spiritual universe are all expressed. Perfectly, somehow, by a man who never heard of the Sonoran Desert."
- Lawrence W. Cheek, from Voices in the Desert: Writings and Photographs
"We go to a mountaintop, or retreat to the desert, or repair to some lonely cove along the wide and empty sea. We are drawn toward wildness as water is toward the level. And there we find the something that we cannot name. We find ourselves, we say. But I suppose that what we really find is the void within ourselves, the loneliness, the surviving heart of wildness, that binds us to all the living earth."
- Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"We have lots of utilitarian answers to the question "Why must there be wild places?". But the most important answer is not utilitarian. It is wildly, hopelessly unscientific. It is that except by the measure of wilderness, we shall never really know the nature of a place, and without a sense of place, never really make a poem, and without a poem we shall never be fully human."
- Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"A mountain-top is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place. It has was Colin Fletcher has called "the self-assurance of diamond beauty."
-Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"I have been affected with wanderlust for as long as I can remember. It is the characteristic hunger of isolation."
- Paul Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year - "Winter"
"The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are frequent. The very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand. Up and down these stony chasms the traveller and his mules clamber as best they can. It is impossible to go far in any direction without crossing them."
-Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927
"In the morning of time they came
Their drums were beating
Their hearts were high
The land summoned them and they loved it."
- Inscription on marble wall of Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, commemorating Native American inhabitants
"I am amazed to discover how quickly reactions have become ingrained, recognition of rock and response the same, mind and arm and canoe one movement, the feel of current penetrating through paddle and spine. And there is the pleasure of a good canoe that responds, that, given its head and managed properly, seems to go of itself and fly over the water. It is heady business, to anticipate the marginal inch necessary to miss a rock, to feel rather than to think of how to go with the the current, to feel that it is your understanding that locks the canoe into the river's running, but that it is pure river that guides you through, pure beautiful river."
- Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
"It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
- Edward Abbey
Something whispered something
that was not even a word.
It was more like a silence
that was understandable.
I was standing
at the edge of the pond.
Nothing living, what we call living,
was in sight.
And yet, the voice entered me,
my body-life,
with so much happiness.
And there was nothing there
but the water, the sky, the grass.
- Mary Oliver
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass
Mine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise ev’ry morning
God’s recreation of the new day
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
- Eleanor Farjeon
You ask me:
Why do I live
On this green mountain?
I smile
No answer
My heart serene
On flowing water . . .
- Li Po, Chinese poet writing about the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in the eighth century
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
- Walt Whitman from "Song of Myself"
Until the Desert knows
That Water grows
His sands suffice
But let him once suspect
That Caspian fact
Sahara dies.
- Emily Dickinson
Twilight: After Haying
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler,
reluctant to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)
The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed-
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
-sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen...the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses...
The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
- Jane Kenyon
(quoted in Imagination in Place, by Wendell Berry)
On and on you will hike,
And I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.
You'll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You'll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
You're off the Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!
- Dr. Suess - from Oh, the Places You'll Go!
- Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher and author of Tao Te Ching.
"... even on the Pacific Crest Trail food is generally abundant but inspiration is scarce and is something to be cherished. May you be blessed with inspiration."
- Bronka Sundstrom, Holocaust survivor, avid hiker and mountaineer who was, in 2002, the oldest woman to summit Mt. Rainier at age 77. She died 11/29/23 at age 98.
"As the crickets' soft autumn hum
is to us
So are we to the trees
As are they
To the rocks and the hills."
- Gary Snyder
"In sublimity - the superlative degree of beauty -
What land can equal the desert?"
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us of what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."
- Terry Tempest Williams, American author and conservationist
“When one of us says, “Look, there's nothing out there,” what we are really saying is, “I cannot see.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert
"As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"On the plains, in the mountains, you learn that you are as important as the beaver, the hawk, the dragonfly - but not more so. You are part of the circle.
- Gaydell Collier
"It doesn't have to be fun to be fun."
- Barry Blanchard, alpinist
"Nature and I are two."
- Woody Allen
"Why do they say we’re over the hill? I don’t even know what that means and why it’s a bad thing. When I go hiking and I get over the hill, that means I’m past the hard part and there’s a snack in my future."
- Ellen DeGeneres
"Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done."
- Rocky Balboa, character in "Rocky" movies, played by Sylvester Stallone.
"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
- John Steinbeck
"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction."
- Rachel Carson, marine biologist, author and conservationist
"In the end, you won't remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain."
- Jack Kerouac
From a Boise Crossfit Instagram post:
"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?" - Epictetus
Cut out processed foods now. Get in a workout today. Turn off the t.v. and go outside. Call a loved one on your drive home from work. Go to bed earlier tonight. Stop waiting - demand better!
"Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death."
- Pascal, "Pensees"
"Change happens through movement and movement heals."
- Joseph Pilates, inventor of the Pilates Method for physical fitness
"The love of mountains is best."
- inscription carved in Greek, found on a summit rock in the Alps by an adventurer in 1558.
"Beauty is the illumination of your soul."
- John O'Donohue, Irish poet, priest, and Hegelian philosopher
"I never knew a man who felt self-important in the morning after spending the night in the open on an Idaho mountainside under a star-studded summer sky."
- Frank Church, former U.S. Senator from Idaho
" It is the strong in body who is both the strong and free in mind."
- Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's father)
"What is magic? In the deepest sense, magic is an experience. It's the experience of finding oneself alive within a world that is itself alive. It is the experience of contact and communication between oneself and something that is profoundly different from oneself: a swallow, a frog, a spider weaving its web."
- David Abram, philosopher, author of Spell of the Sensuous, and Becoming Animal
Find tongues in trees,
books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stone, and
good in everything.
- William Shakespeare
"The real blessings of life are not the fictions generally supposed, but are real, and are mostly within reach of all."
- Walt Whitman
"The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but the complexity of the land organism. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?"
- Aldo Leopold
"Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it."
- Andy Rooney
"No matter how simple, stark, or barren an ecological world seems, be prepared to have it baffle your best efforts. Never underestimate life."
- Stephen Trimble, from The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin.
"The true pleasure in life comes from meeting challenges in whatever form they present themselves."
- Patricia Ordoobadi
"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."
- Albert Einstein
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest . . . a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
- Albert Einstein
"I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence."
- Marilynne Robinson, novelist - winner of 2005 Pulitzer prize for novel Gilead
"The worst thing is to doubt what the Earth wants."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Perhaps it isn't will at all that fuels a person to the top of a mountain. Perhaps it is the ache for beauty. A desire to be dangled over the canyon of nothingness. To, in fact, lose one's will for a moment.
Perhaps climbing a mountain is nothing more than an act of worship, and reaching the barren perch of a summit is to experience pure awe."
-Lucy Jane Bledsoe, The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic
"Over everything is the desert silence. You don't have to go far from the road to hear it. It is a prevailing, enormous, patient silence, not even dented by the small sounds that occur in it. It is primordial, here before the beginning. The world occurs in it."
- Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land
"If ever a man was permitted to receive and enjoy some blessings that might alleviate the many sorrows to which he is exposed, it is certainly in the country, when he attentively considers those ravishing scenes with which he is everywhere surrounded."
- Jean de Crevecoeur, Letter II from an American Farmer
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you."
- Frank Lloyd Wright
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games."
- Ernest Hemingway
"I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it's never done."
- Ernest Hemingway
"There is something very restful about the horizontal line. Things that lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peaceful with them."
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
". . . we fail to realize how special our ordinary world really is. We come to national parks and other preserves primed for appreciation yet disdain the fat, maroon caterpillars on the pipevine in the alley or the mockingbird on the clothesline with an earwig in its bill. Thoreau said, 'I had no idea there was so much going on in Heywood's meadow.' Heywood's meadow is all around us."
Janice Emily Bowers, The Mountains Next Door
"The more one looks, the more (magically) there is to see. There can be no end to esthetic discovery in this land, because artistic stimuli are as omnipresent here as they are likely to be anywhere, with respect at least to inorganic art. The landscape here is one of idealized, archetypal forms: an intricate natural mosaic of surprise, expectation, anticipation, and excitement."
- Ward J. Roylance - The Enchanted Wilderness (his writings about the land in Southern Utah)
"The primary task of the human is a recognition of the Beauty in which we find ourselves."
- Thomas Berry
"To the Earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the Earth will not miss us . . . Let's be clear: The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."
- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
“The shadows of foliage, the drift of clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound of running waters – all the gentler qualities of nature that minor poets love to juggle with – are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh, and at first repellant. But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation! And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring! It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies."
- John C. Van Dyke, The Desert
"The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellant - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agoraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently."
- Edward Abbey, The Journey Home
"To know the Canyon is to love it? Not necessarily. Crawling up the Tanner Trail some moonlight night in August, without food or water, you will hate the Canyon. Bitterly. That pale rim so far above, higher than five Empire State Buildings piled one upon another, seems inaccessible as Heaven, remote as salvation. But if you survive . . . Who could ask for a finer place than our Canyon in which to taste life deeply by risking life? By hanging it over the edge?
- Edward Abbey referring to the Grand Canyon, from Down the River
"In spite of this, after walking there for days, coming home bug-bitten, shins bruised, nose peeling, feet and hands swollen, I feel ablaze with life. I suspect that the canyons give me an intensified sense of living partly because I not only face the basics of living and survival, but carry them on my back. And in my head. And this intense personal responsibility gives me an overwhelming sense of freedom I know nowhere else."
- Ann Zwinger, Wind in the Rock: The Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah
"Nature, time, and patience are the three best physicians."
- Ann Zwinger - The Art of Wandering in The Nearsighted Naturalist
"As long as you are making images, you are living the dream."
- Michael Kadillak, photographer
"But the Parthenon serves no useful purpose, either; if we tore it down we could erect buildings to shelter an inadequately housed population....And yet man, if he took the trouble, could rebuild the Parthenon ten times over. But he will never be able to recreate a single canyon, which was formed during thousands of years of patient erosion by sun, wind and water...."
- Jean Dorst, Before Nature Dies
"Even though age diminishes our physical capacities, it will happen even faster if we don't test ourselves. How else would you find out how much you could do?"
- Mike Carlson, Five-time Race to Robie Creek Champion
"Being fit makes everything in life more enjoyable."
- Doug Traubel
"It's a tough road that leads to heights of greatness."
- Seneca
"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
- Leonardo Da Vinci
"For in truth, art is implicit in nature, and whoever can extract it has it."
- Albrecht Durer, German painter and printmaker, German Renaissance theorist
"The joy of Nature is older than the joy of man."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Heaven is beneath our feet as well as above our heads.
- Henry David Thoreau
"I wish to speak a word for Nature,
for absolute freedom and wilderness."
- Henry David Thoreau
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
"We need the tonic of wildness...we can never have enough nature."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
"The society we have created puts us in constant danger lest we ultimately find ourselves unable to direct the more and more complicated apparatus we have devised."
- Joseph Wood Krutch, Wilderness as More than a Tonic
"Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"Not to have known - as most men have not - either the mountain or the desert is not to have known one's self. Not to have known one's self is to have known no one."
- Joseph Wood Krutch
"The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy."
- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
"O to realize space!
The plenteousness of all, that there are no bounds,
To emerge and be of the sky, of the sun and moon and flying clouds,
as one with them."
- Walt Whitman
“Today I remember blessings from the land and sky. I was searching when I turned to the land, but not for what I found. The land and sky gave me gifts, and along the way I found what I was looking for.”
- Patty Litzel, “Gifts from the Sky”, Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West
"Freedom lies in being bold."
- Robert Frost
"We jounce over the crested wheat grass, sweating and silent, each of us glancing over the Badlands to the east. The land seems to ripple with heat waves. If I half-close my eyes, I can't see the fences or the distant electric towers; the land beyond the puny strip plowed by the homesteaders disappears into the distance. I can see the earth stretch, flex its muscles. Fence wires tighten, hum, snap and disappear. The earth lies under the sun as it did ten thousand years ago - clean, ready for the buffalo's track and the human footprint."
- Linda Hasselstrom, Going Over East - Reflections of a Woman Rancher
"I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass..."
- Willa Cather, My Antonia
"During summer's dry heat, I have heard: 'I ain't had no rain on me since May. There ain't enough grass on me to feed a bird.' And, 'If I don't get rain on me pretty soon, I'm going to blow away.' These ranchers referred to their land in the most intimate terms possible."
- Linda Hasselstrom, Land Circle: Writings Collected from the Land
"I have come to feel that there is here in North America a hidden place obscured by what we have built upon it, and that whenever we penetrate the surface of the life around us that place and its spirit can be found."
- John Haines
"The view from San Jacinto is the most sublime spectacle to be found anywhere on this earth!"
- John Muir
"Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul."
- John Muir
"Keep close to Nature's heart and break clear, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
- John Muir
"Now he walks in quiet solitude, the forest and the streams
seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try and understand
the serenity of a clear blue mountain lake."
- John Denver, from his song Rocky Mountain High
" My father used to say that it's never too late to do anything you want to do."
-Michael Jordan
"You must expect great things from yourself before you can do them."
- Michael Jordan
"I have written many words about this canyon and mountain and the pure physical descriptions always fall short, weak bloopers that never make it out of the literary infield. If you want to understand the character of this mountain you first have to go there with boots and backpack (watch for rattlers), and let it bloody you up some - and then you should go home and listen to the last five piano sonatas of Beethoven, because there the mountain's craggy attitude, indomitable will, and presence in the spiritual universe are all expressed. Perfectly, somehow, by a man who never heard of the Sonoran Desert."
- Lawrence W. Cheek, from Voices in the Desert: Writings and Photographs
"We go to a mountaintop, or retreat to the desert, or repair to some lonely cove along the wide and empty sea. We are drawn toward wildness as water is toward the level. And there we find the something that we cannot name. We find ourselves, we say. But I suppose that what we really find is the void within ourselves, the loneliness, the surviving heart of wildness, that binds us to all the living earth."
- Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"We have lots of utilitarian answers to the question "Why must there be wild places?". But the most important answer is not utilitarian. It is wildly, hopelessly unscientific. It is that except by the measure of wilderness, we shall never really know the nature of a place, and without a sense of place, never really make a poem, and without a poem we shall never be fully human."
- Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"A mountain-top is not simply an elevation, but an island, a world within a world, a place out of place. It has was Colin Fletcher has called "the self-assurance of diamond beauty."
-Paul Gruchow, from The Necessity of Empty Places
"I have been affected with wanderlust for as long as I can remember. It is the characteristic hunger of isolation."
- Paul Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year - "Winter"
"The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are frequent. The very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand. Up and down these stony chasms the traveller and his mules clamber as best they can. It is impossible to go far in any direction without crossing them."
-Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927
"In the morning of time they came
Their drums were beating
Their hearts were high
The land summoned them and they loved it."
- Inscription on marble wall of Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, commemorating Native American inhabitants
"I am amazed to discover how quickly reactions have become ingrained, recognition of rock and response the same, mind and arm and canoe one movement, the feel of current penetrating through paddle and spine. And there is the pleasure of a good canoe that responds, that, given its head and managed properly, seems to go of itself and fly over the water. It is heady business, to anticipate the marginal inch necessary to miss a rock, to feel rather than to think of how to go with the the current, to feel that it is your understanding that locks the canoe into the river's running, but that it is pure river that guides you through, pure beautiful river."
- Ann Zwinger, Run, River, Run: A Naturalist's Journey Down One of the Great Rivers of the American West
"It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”
- Edward Abbey
Something whispered something
that was not even a word.
It was more like a silence
that was understandable.
I was standing
at the edge of the pond.
Nothing living, what we call living,
was in sight.
And yet, the voice entered me,
my body-life,
with so much happiness.
And there was nothing there
but the water, the sky, the grass.
- Mary Oliver
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
Sweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass
Mine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise ev’ry morning
God’s recreation of the new day
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
- Eleanor Farjeon
You ask me:
Why do I live
On this green mountain?
I smile
No answer
My heart serene
On flowing water . . .
- Li Po, Chinese poet writing about the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River in the eighth century
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.
- Walt Whitman from "Song of Myself"
Until the Desert knows
That Water grows
His sands suffice
But let him once suspect
That Caspian fact
Sahara dies.
- Emily Dickinson
Twilight: After Haying
Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?
The men sprawl near the baler,
reluctant to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)
The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed-
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
-sings from the dusty stubble.
These things happen...the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses...
The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.
- Jane Kenyon
(quoted in Imagination in Place, by Wendell Berry)
On and on you will hike,
And I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.
You'll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You'll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
You're off the Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!
- Dr. Suess - from Oh, the Places You'll Go!