OUTDOOR QUOTES TO PONDER
Thunder is good,
thunder is impressive,
but it is the lightning
that does the work.
-Mark Twain
I like trees
because
they seem more resigned
to the way they have to live
than other things do.
-Willa
Cather, O Pioneers
It is unfair to blame man
too fiercely for being pugnacious;
he learned the habit from nature.
-Christopher Moreley, Inward Ho!
Never does nature say one thing
and wisdom another.
-Juvenal, Satires
Silently one by one,
in the infinite meadows of heaven,
blossomed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of the angels.
-Longfellow, Evangeline
The whole secret of the study of nature
lies in learning how to use one's eyes.
-George Sand
Someone said to Socrates
that a certain man had
grown no better by his travels.
"I should think not," he said:
"he took himself along with him."
-Michel de
Montaigne
A traveler.
I love his title.
A traveler is to be reverenced as such.
His profession is the best symbol of our life.
Going from--toward;
it is the history of every one of us.
-Henry
David Thoreau
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
-Shakespeare Trollus and Cressida
People from a planet without flowers would think we must
be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
-Iris
Murdoch A Fairly Honorable Defeat
The wind shows us how close to the edge we are
-Joan
Didion
Rocks do not recommend the land to the tiller of the soil,
but they recommend it to those who reap a harvest of another sort--the artist,
the poet. the walker, the student, and lover of all primitive open-air things.
-John
Burroughs
Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now
possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing
anything.
-Charles
Kuralt, On The Road
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds.
-John
Milton Paradise Lost
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the
sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
-John 3:8
To make a prairie it takes clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
-Emily
Dickinson
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives
in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a
storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.
-Henry
David Thoreau, Walden
Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a
hymn of praise to God.
-Maria
Mitchell
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I
travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
-Robert
Loius Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey
A road is a dagger placed in the heart of a
wilderness.
-William O.
Do not look to the ground for your next step;
greatness lies with those who look to the horizon.
--Norwegian
Proverb
I do not own an inch of land, but all I see is mine.
Lucy Larcom
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have
walked out in the rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
-Robert
Frost, Acquainted with the Night.
I chatter, chatter, as I flow,
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever
--Alfred
Lord Tennyson The Brook
The clearest way into the universe is through a forest
wilderness.
-John Muir
The mountains lie in the curves so tender I want to
lay my arm around them as God does.
-Olive
Dargan, Twilight
The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes,
their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken
language mostly too faint for the ears.
-John Muir
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a
journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or
imagined--how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
-Peter
Matthiessen
“A man does not climb a mountain without bringing
some of it away with him, and leaving something of himself upon it." --
Sir Martin Conway
"We don't stop hiking because we grow old,
we grow old because we stop hiking."
-- Finis Mitchell,