Favorite Quotations

"You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.
My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances."
-Chris McCandless

On this sacred night, when the aurora looked like rain, I reflected back on my childhood dreams of flying a spaceship through the infinite expanse of space... to be among the mosaic of billions of stars, and visit other worlds. Now as I look from space at our planet I realize that had I been born and spent my childhood here in space... how much greater and more vivid my dreams would have been to visit this blue planet.
-Douglas H. Wheelock

We camp out to get close to remote woods and waters that offer the best sport; to relish the fresh air, freedom, and the good fellowship available nowhere else; and to get far enough away from the restraint, noise, and crowds of the big towns to enjoy the friendship of the seasons. If our camp is comfortable, so much the better. There is no reason why it should not be.
As the Hudson's Bay Company says after nearly three centuries in the farthest and most primitive reaches of this continent, "There is usually little object in traveling tough just for the sake of being tough."
Rough it, sure, if you want to prove to yourself the actually very important fact that you can rought it. One day, it's true, anyone at all may be thrown entirely upon his own resources and forced to get along the best he can with a minimum of comforts.
But as far as the preference goes, roughing it is a development stage. Once we've successfully tested our ability to take it, a whole lot of doubts and inhibitions disappear. We find ourselves realizing that the real challenge lies in smoothing it. We come to appreciate that making it easy on ourselves takes a lot more experience and ingenuity than building it through the tough way.
-Townsend Whelen & Bradford Angier in On Your Own in the Wilderness, 1958

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea; by giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day ... for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year areer. That's half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought.
You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
-William Deresiewicz

"Weapons are inauspicious instruments, not the tools of the enlightened. When there is no choice but to use them, it is best to be calm and free from greed, and not celebrate victory. Those who celebrate victory are bloodthirsty, and the bloodthirsty cannot have their way in the world."
-Sun Tzu; The Art of War

"To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal effect asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises. But if people merely become caught up in reacting, moving to the left or to the right, depending on conditions, the result is only more activity. The non-moving point of origin, which lies outside the realm of relativity, is passed over, unnoticed. I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti-pollution activities, no matter how commendable are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age."
-Masanobu Fukuoka; The One Straw Revolution

"Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities."
-Henry Ward Beecher

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
-President John F. Kennedy; September 12 1962

"Tell me the truth and I'll believe, tell me a fact and I'll remember it, but tell me your story and it'll live in my heart forever."
-Indian Proverb

"In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope."
-Barack Obama

"If there is no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."
-Mother Theresa

"You're judged by what you do for people who can't do anything for you."

"Have no hard feelings toward anyone who has not shown you enmity, do not fight with anyone who does not oppose you."
-Zhuge Liang

"Those who are skilled in combat do not become angered, those who are skilled at winning do not become afraid. Thus the wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win."
-Zhuge Liang

"A rich man is one with knowledge, happiness and his health."
-Common

"We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share."
-President John F. Kennedy; May 25, 1961

"Always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way nothing can stand in the way of the voices of millions calling for change."
-Barack Obama

"The camera has the power to catch so-called normal people in such a way as to make them look abnormal. The photographer chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it."
-Susan Sontag

"When the going get tough, baby you got to toughen up."
-Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown

"The stone that the builders rejected has become the head cornerstone."
-Psalm 118:22

"The camera is an instrument that teaches you to see without a camera."
-Dorothea Lange