OUTDOOR QUOTES TO
PONDER
My collection of
outdoor quotes I’ve gotten from trail journals on The Appalachian Trail,
Pacific Crest Trail and CDT and elsewhere. –Keith Drury www.keithdrury.com
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,
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,
email: keith.drury@indwes.edu
web: www.KeithDrury.com