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QUOTES
INSPIRATION FROM GREAT MINDS
"If we take care of nature, nature will take care of us."
- David Attenborough
"There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing."
- Alfred Wainwright
"Spiritual power can no man see. We do not see Heaven command the four seasons, and yet they never swerve from their course."
- Alan Watts
“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.”
- Khalil Gibran
“People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known the wren?”
- Robert Michael Pyle
“The world is not in your books and maps. It is out there.”
- Gandalf
“We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
- Native American proverb
“I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure.”
- D. H. Lawrence
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
- Rabindranath Tagore
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- W.B. Yeats
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”
- Henri Matisse
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
- Gary Snyder
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
- Lao Tzu
“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
"I think England is the very place for a fluent and fiery writer. The highest hymns of the sum are written in the dark. I like the grey country. A bucket of Greek sun would drown in one colour the crowds of colour I like trying to mix for myself out of grey flat insular mud."
- Dylan Thomas
"The longer one stays out here, the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, it's vastness, and also it's grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint tipped arrow onto the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own."
- Arthur Conan Doyle
"When I go out into the countryside and see the sun and the green and everything flowering, I say to myself "Yes indeed, all that belongs to me!"
- Henri Rousseau
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
- Terry Pratchett
“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”
- George Eliot
“Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
- Henry van Dyke
“If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.”
- Willy Wonka
“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
“Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.”
- A.A. Milne
"If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood, go for another walk."
- Hippocrates
“After a day’s walk, everything has twice its usual value.”
- George Macauley Trevelyan
“As you walk down the fairway of life, you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.”
- Ben Hogan
“If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”
- Charles Dickens
“But the beauty is in the walking; we are betrayed by destinations.”
- Gwyn Thomas
“He could tell by the way animals walked that they were keeping time to some kind of music. Maybe it was the song in their own hearts that they walked to.”
- Laura Adams Armer
“Trees are an analogy of what we aspire to be - grounded in our awareness and dependence upon the Earth, interconnected to our own mutual benefit, strong yet pliant in the face of storms, and patient in the knowledge that spring sunshine will always return.”
- Jo Woolf
“Why does a man climb mountains? Why has he forced his tired and sweating body up here when he might instead have been sitting at his ease in a deckchair at the seaside, looking at girls in bikinis, or fast asleep, or sucking ice-cream, according to his fancy. On the face of it the thing doesn’t make sense.
Yet more and more people are turning to the hills; they find something in these wild places that can be found nowhere else. It may be solace for some, satisfaction for others: the joy of exercising muscles that modern ways of living have cramped, perhaps; or a balm for jangled nerves in the solitude and silence of the peaks; or escape from the clamour and tumult of everyday existence. It may have something to do with man’s subconscious search for beauty, growing keener as so much in the world grows uglier. It may be a need to re-adjust his sights, to get out of his narrow groove and climb above it to see wider horizons and truer perspectives.
Or it may be, and for most walkers it will be, quite simply, a deep love of the hills, a love that has grown over the years, whatever motive first took them there: a feeling that these hills are friends, tried and trusted friends, always there when needed.”
- Alfred Wainwright
“When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree.
The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”
- Ram Dass
"I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is...I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimetre; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts."
- Richard Feynman
“Those who go into wilderness, into Nature that has not been tamed, are no longer under (arbitrary) human law, but under the all-encompassing, inevitable law of Nature. They go out from under human law. They are no longer citizens, they are not orderly, they are not civilised - they are outlaws. When you go into wilderness, something happens, something that civilisation does not like. That's why they cut it down, you know.”
- Stephen Harrod Buhner
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