[at-l] Outdoor Quotes (long) 2 of 2

[pmags at yahoo.com (Paul Magnanti)]

It is in our nature to explore, to reach into the
unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore
at all. --Sir Ernest Shackleton

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
--J.R.R. Tolkien

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention
of arriving safely, in one handsome and well-preserved
piece. You should slide broadside across that finish
line, thoroughly used up, worn out, leaking oil, and 
shouting 'Geronimo!'
--Unknown

Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing
something completely pointless.
--Calvin from the CALVIN AND HOBBES comic strip

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get
there some day.  --Winnie the Pooh
    
Calories, carbohydrates and pain killer all rolled
into one. A hiker's best friend!
-- Thru-hiker referring to beer on the DVD "REALLY
LIVIN'"

It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it
is the journey that matters in the end.
-- Ursula K. LeGuin 

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less
and less about the meaning of his own life, but that
it bothers him less and less.  --Vaclav Havel

I too am not a bit untamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
- Walt  Whitman

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of
them are dirt. --Anon.

And of what value was the journey? It is as well for
those who ask such questions that there are others who
feel the answer and never need to ask.
-- Wally Herbert, polar explorer

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

Let us probe the silent places, 
let us seek what luck betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whis er on the night-wind, 
there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling. . . let us go.
--Robert Service, THE CALL OF THE WILD

It is not down in any map; true places never are. 
--Herman Melville, MOBY DICK

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or  we find it not.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everyone comes back. It makes no difference how far we
wander, we  always have our country, our land, in our
souls and our minds.
--Ruben Blades

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river
runs through it. The river was cut by the world's
great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of 
time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.
Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words
are theirs.  I am hauntedby waters. 
--Norman Maclean, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT 

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the
human spirit. --Ed Abbey

Running provides happiness which is different from
pleasure. Happiness has to do with struggling and
enduring and accomplishing. --George Sheehan

...for there is no opiate like Alpine pedestrianism.
--Mark Twain, A TRAMP ABOARD

I learned early that the richness of life is found in
adventure. Adventure calls on all the faculties of
mind and spirit. It develops self-reliance and
independence. Life then teems with excitement. But man
is not ready for adventure unless he is rid of fear.
For
fear confines him and limits his scope. He stays
tethered by strings of doubt and indecision and has
only a small and narrow world to explore.
--William O. Douglas, OF MEN AND MOUNTAINS

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
--Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 

Never for me the lowered banner, never the last
endeavour. --Sir Ernest Shackleton

..there is always a Land of Beyond for those who are
true to the trail. --Robert Service

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with
one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled
balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and
you can become drunk with the belief that all's 
right with the world.  --Ada Louise Huxtable 

I know dark clouds will gather o'er me
I know my pathway's rough and steep
But golden fields lie out before me
Where weary eyes no more shall weep
-- THE WAYFARING STRANGER (Traditional)

The mind and body do not necessarily have to follow
the the same path.--Anon.

Surely the true path is to dive deep into nature.
--Vincent Van Gough

Theres is no real hope of traveling perfectly light in
the mountains. It is good to try,as long as you
realize that,like proving a unified field theory,
mastering Kanji,or routinely brewing the perfect cup
of coffee,
the game can never be won. -- Smoke Blanchard

Not all who wander are lost.
--J.R.R. Tolkien

...never easy, often painful, but always rewarding. 
--from the Colorado Trail data book

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And
joy  is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to
eat and make money. We eat and make  money to be able
to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life
is for. --George Mallory, on climbing Mount Everest

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. -- Thoreau

A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off
on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in
their path; let them take risks, for godsake,
let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten
by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the
right and privilege of any free American.
--Ed Abbey

Do not look to the ground for your next step;
greatness lies with those who look to
the horizon. --Norwegian Proverb

To travel, to experience and learn; that is to live.
-- Tenzing Norgay

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest
aspirations. I may not reach them, but I
can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and
follow where they lead. -- Louisa May Alcott

Everything else being equal,choose a john with a view.
-- Colin Fletcher

Live well. It is the greatest revenge.
--The Talmud

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

Remember that nature and the elements are neither your
friend or your enemy; they are actually disinterested.
--Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76
"Survival" Oct. 1970 

Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust
strangers and to  lose sight of all that familiar
comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off
balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things
- air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky; all things
tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it. 
--Cesare Pavese

Live Simply so that others may simply live. 
~Elizabeth Ann Seton.

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it
attached to the rest of the world. ~John Muir

We should eat all our food so we shan't have to carry
it. --Winnie the Pooh

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was
on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity
would cure this itch. When years described me as
mature, the remedy  prescribed was middle age. In
middle age I was assured that greater age would calm
my fever  and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps
senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. ... In
other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a
bum always a bum.  I fear the disease is incurable.
-- John Steinbeck, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our
antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age,
spiritual types. But if the material world is merely
illusion, an honest guru should  be as content with
Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice,
tofu, and seaweed slime. --Ed Abbey

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
--Albert Camus

When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of
the night at the least sound in fear of what my life
and my children's lives may be, 
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. 
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. 
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am
free.
--Wendell Berry, THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

Strange the faithless fuss made about taking a walk in
the safest and pleasantest of all places, a
wilderness. --John Muir

Life is cruel? Compared to what?
--Ed Abbey

I was the world in which I walked.
--Wallace Stevens, TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON

Farewell we call to hearth and hall!
Though wind may blow and rain may fall.
We must away ere the break of day.
Far over wood and mountain tall.
--J.R.R. Tolkien, LORD OF THE RINGS

It is always there, of course, when you come back from
the green world. You have been living by sunrise and
sunset, by wind and rain, surrounded by the
ebb and flow of lives that respond only to such
simple, rhythmic elements. But now the tone and tempo
of the days switch. Instead of harmony, jangle.
--Colin Fletcher, WINDS OF MARA

It is a great art to saunter.
--Thoreau

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not
possible.  --Frank Zappa

Hark! Hark to the wind! 'Tis the night, they say,
When all souls come back from the far away-
The dead, forgotten this many a day!
--Virna Sheard

Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate
yourself to walk very far. 
--Thomas Jefferson

...as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded
forever. --Herman Melville, MOBY DICK

The sun is slowly sinkin'
The day is almost gone
Still darkness falls around us
And we must journey on
--DARKEST HOUR IS JUST BEFORE DAWN (Traditional)

For as I far as I can see, the canyon country of
southern Utah extends in all directions. No compass
can orient me here, only a pledge to love
and walk the terrifying distances before me. What I
fear and desire most in the world is passion. I fear
it because it promises to be spotaneous, out of my
control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self.
I desire it because passion has color, like the
landscape before me. It is not pale. It is
not nuetral. It reveals the backside of the heart.
--Terry Tempest Williams, RED

I'm drunk on the fiery elixer of beauty.
--Everett Ruess, VAGABOND FOR BEAUTY

There is something in the country...in the vastness
and emptiness of it, that  resists knowing, --Rob
Schultheis, THE HIDDEN WEST

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature - daily
to be shown matter,  to come in contact with it,
rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks, the solid 
earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact!
Contact! --Thoreau, KTAADN

Hunger makes the best sauce. --Anon.

Oh! the snow, the beautiful snow, Filling the sky and
earth below, Over the housetops, over the street, Over
the heads of the people you meet. Dancing, Flirting,
Skimming along. --J.W.Watson


There is a privacy about it which no other season
gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort
of have an open season on each other; only in the
winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet
stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.
--Ruth Stout

My latest sun is sinking fast
My race is nearly run
My longest trials now are past
My triumph has begun
--ANGEL BAND (Traditional)

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if
you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
--Ed Abbey

In every walk with nature one receives far more than
he seeks. --John Muir

Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them
--A. A. Milne, EEYORE from WINNIE THE POOH

The problem of living is at bottom an economic one.
And this alone is bad enough, even in a period of
so-called "normalcy." But living has been considerably
complicated of late in various ways - by war, by
questions of personal liberty, and by "menaces" 
of one kind or another. 
--Benton Mackaye, 1921, AN APPALACHIAN TRAIL: A
PROJECT IN REGIONAL PLANNING

Learn the rules, so you can break them properly. --The
Dalai Lama

We rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that
suffering produces perseverance; perseverance,
character; character, hope. And hope does 
not disappoint us. --Romans 5:3-5


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The true harvest of my life is intangible.... a little stardust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched
--Thoreau
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