Quotes

“Everything that in nature is great, everything that is pleasant, everything that is that terrible, it is comparable to the Etna and Etna is not comparable to anything. “

“Voyage en Sicilie”, 1788  Dominique Vivand Denon 

I wonder how long this word will last, governed exclusively by the merciless, inhuman and immoral criteria of global economy. Seeing the shadow of distant islands, I imagined one still inhabited by a tribe of poets set aside for when, after the middle age of materialism, humanity will have to start to put other values into his existence.

Tiziano Terzani

There is an eternal landscape, a geography of soul: we search for its outlines all our lives.

Josephine Hart

I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

Henry David Thoreau

“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length–and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”

Carlos Castaneda

“Magical places are always beautiful and deserve to be contemplated, they represent a the bridge between the invisible and the visible.”

Paulo Coelho

“When one loses the deep intimate relationship with nature, then temples, mosques, and churches become important.”

J. Krishnamurti

“I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so sublime.”

Paul Theroux

Nature often holds up a mirror so we can see more clearly the ongoing processes of growth, renewal, and transformation in our lives.

Mary Ann Brussat

“One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.”

Albert Einstein

“I had heard about the stupendous iridescence of the aurora upon the Ionian Sea, when you contemplate it from Etna’s summit…The earthly and marine vastness revealed to our sight stretched as far as Africa, clearly visible, and Greece, as far as you could have guessed. It was one of the supreme moments of my life. Nothing was missing, not the golden fringe of a cloud, nor the eagles…”

There is nothing permanent except change.

Heraclitus

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

“After hurting my mind, wearing out my spirit and neglecting my body while studying the worlds’ religions… I realized I’m a Worshiper of Aliveness who belongs to the Order of Nature, with the Sun as my Priest, Mountains as my Cathedrals, the Seas as my Holy Mother of God, Animals as my Angels and Art as my Hallelujah.”

When you are going to hike – pack a light heart.

Dan May

The butterfly counts not months but  moments and has time enough.

Rabridanath Tagore

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. Then sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

Peter Matthiessen

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

John Muir

When there is no place that you have decided to call your own, then no matter where you go, you are always heading home.

Muso Soseki

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.

Joseph Campbell

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

William Blake

“I seem, like everything else, to be a center, a sort of vortex, at which the whole energy of the universe realizes itself.. Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.” 

Alan Watts

The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Joseph Wood Krutch

As you walk, you simply walk. Don’t go ahead, don’t jump here and there. Mind always go ahead or lag behind. Remain with the moment.

Osho

You need special shoes for hiking – and a bit of a special soul as well.

Emme Woodhull Bäche

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

Edmund Hillary

It is in man’s heart that the life of nature’s spectacle exists; to see it, one must feel it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anais Nin

Think what a great world revolution will take place when there are millions of guys all over the world with rucksacks on their backs tramping around the back country.

Jack Kerouac

Yin and Yang are not in competition or conflict to each other, but are complements of each other. Balance is not a state but a process. The Tao is a process, a dynamic condition of balance.

Ray Grigg

When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one’s physical powers and the character of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual.

Aleister Crowley

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

Aldo Leopold

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Carl Sagan

Wherever you are is the entry point.

Kabir

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connected.

Chief Seattle

For me and for thousands with similar inclinations, the most important passion of life is the overpowering desire to escape periodically from the clutches of a mechanistic civilization. To us the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness.

Bob Marshall

Gradually, physicists began to realise that nature, at the atomic level, does not appear as a mechanical universe composed of fundamental building blocks, but rather as a network of relations, and that, ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web. Whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures our attention.

Fritjof Capra

The longest journey begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

This is a concept that western culture has forgotten : everything is one! The idea of dichotomy is deeply wrong and nothing is better than a great symbol of China, the Tao, the wheel of yin and yang that represents life. The universe is the harmony of opposites, because there is no water without fire, there is no female with no male, there is no night without day, there is no sun without the moon … there is no good without evil! This symbol is perfect since the white and black are embracing each other; inside the white there is a black point and inside the black there is a white point.

Tiziano Terzani

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Charles Darwin

If there is any wisdom running through my life now, in my walking on this earth, it came from listening in the Great Silence to the stones, trees, space, the wild animals, to the pulse of all life as my heartbeat. 

Vijali Hamilton

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Bertrand Russell

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

If you imagine yourself as separate from the world, the world will appear as separate from you and you will experience desire and fear. I do not see the world as separate from me and so there is nothing for me to desire, or fear.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.

Joseph Campbell

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

Walt Whitman

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. . . Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Carl Gustav Jung

A human being is part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein

The Tao is both singular and universal. It is open to all with the resolve and inclination to walk it. Those who do, however, take a variety of disciplines in approaching it, for the Tao extrapolates from the specific to the general.

Dave Lowry

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you ar out there.

Yasutani Roshi

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.

Joseph Campbell

We are all born originals – why is it so many of us die copies?

Edward Young

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars… and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers – for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

Osho

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.

Raymond Inmon

Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps,it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead.

No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.

Eduardo Hughes Galeano

The “paradox” is only a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality “ought” to be.

Richard Feynman

Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye.

Miyamoto Musashi

Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.

Konrad Lorenz

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Chuang-tzu

There are two kinds of climbers, those who climb because their heart sings when they’re in the mountains, and all the rest.

Alex Lowe

Changing the world begins with the very personal process of changing yourself, the only place you can begin is where you are, and the only time you can begin is always now.

Gary Zukav

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

G. K. Chesterton

Rivers and rocks and trees have always been talking to us, but we’ve forgotten how to listen.

Michael Roads

The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.

Gregory Bateson

The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.

Eugene Herrigel

Two roads diverged in a wood and I,

I took the one less traveled by

and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

Joseph Conrad

Out beyond our ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Rumi

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson

My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms will it return to my body when they scatter?

Kotomichi

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

Soren Kierkegaard

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

Native American Proverb

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

Gary Snyder

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu

The man with the backpack is never lost. No matter whither he may stray, his food and shelter are right with him, and home is wherever he may choose to stop.”

Horace Kephart

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Alan Watts

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Ursula K. LeGui

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Henry David Thoreau

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.

Jack Kerouac

When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

Jimi Hendrix

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…

John Muir

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Kahlil Gibran

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?

Charles Schulz

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

H.L.Mencken

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

George Bernard Shaw

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Mevlana Jelalu’ddin Rumi

Every situation, every moment is of infinite worth for it is representative of a whole eternity.

John Wolfgang Goethe

Be yourself; everybody else is already taken.

Oscar Wilde

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen that you bring up there.

Robert M. Pirsing

When your mind is empty of prejudices you can see the Tao. When your hearth is empty of desires you can follow the Tao.

Master Lu

I don’t climb mountains. Mountains climb me. The mountain is myself. I climb on myself.

Nanao Sasaki

And if there is not any such thing as long time, nor the rest of our lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, then now is thing to praise and I am very happy with it.

Ernest Hemingway

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

An eternity in an hour.

William Blake

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

Blaise Pascal

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Rabindranath Tagore

Climb up on some hill at sunrise. Everybody needs perspective once in a while, and you’ll find it there.

Robb Sagendorph

Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.

Walt Whitman

Be as simple as you can be; you will be astonished to see how uncomplicated and happy your life can become.

Paramahansa Yogananda

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature’s way.

Aristotle

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Albert Camus

Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.

Jules Renard

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers.

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers.

But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest.

For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains,

and rivers once again as rivers.

Ching-yuan

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

Steven Wright

Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.

Thich Nhat Hanh

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

Fred Allen

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Tom Robbins

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

What is mind? No matter.

What is matter? Never mind.

George Berkeley

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Aldo Leopold

The real trick to life is not to be in the known, but to be in the mystery.

Fred Alan Wolf

It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville

Remember when life’s path is steep, keep your mind even.

Horace

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

Richard Feynman

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.

Rachel Carson

The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.

Blaise Pascal

Earth laughs in flowers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our true home is in the present moment. To live in the present moment is a miracle. The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green Earth in the present moment…

Thich Nhat Hanh

A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the western mechanistic paradigm.

Stanislav Grof

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Oscar Wilde

There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast.

Paul Scott Mowrer

To get or not to get what we desire can be equally disappointing.

Epictetus

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake

Create each day anew by clothing yourself with heaven and earth, bathing yourself with wisdom and love, and placing yourself in the heart of Mother Nature.

Morihei Ueshiba

Each time dawn appears,the mystery is there in its eternity.

Arthur Rimbaud

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.

James Openheim

Each person shines with his or her own light. No two flames are alike. There are big flames and little flames, flames of every color. Some people’s flames are so still they don’t even flicker in the wind, while others have wild flames that fill the air with sparks. Some foolish flames neither burn nor shed light, but others blaze with life so fiercely that you can’t look at them without blinking, and if you approach you shine in the fire.
Eduardo Galeano

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

John Fowles

No man can cross the same river twice because neither the man nor the river are the same.

Heraclitus

If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.

Vincent Van Gogh

Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.

Hermann Hesse

Some people walk in the rain, other just get wet.

Roger Miller

Nature talks in symbols; he who lacks imagination cannot understand her.

Abraham Miller

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heaven and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

Elizabeth Aston

David Attenborough

 We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Thich Nhat Hahn

In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.
William Blake

Look with soft eyes.
See the place where the tides and the seasons and the turning of the earth
all come together and everything that is becomes one.
You’ve got to seek that place with your soul.
The Legend of Bagger Vance

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking

Friedrich Nietzsche

Away, away, from men and towns, / To the wild wood and the downs, — / To the silent wilderness, / Where the soul need not repress / Its music. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley