Thomas > Thomas's Quotes

“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Seeing in myself this purity of livelihood, I found great solace in dwelling in the forest.”
― Bhikkhu Ñaṇamoli, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya

“Any time a magnet wiggles, no matter how small it is, or how fast or slow it wiggles, it makes some kind of light. Most light is made by little magnets called molecules, and our eyes are tuned to a very narrow range of it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“It was an accident. It had to do with random mutations in our DNA that, at the time, didn’t matter. We were already getting plenty of vitamin C coming up out of our liver. It came from our food and was not broken down in our stomach, intestines, or liver. It emerged into the bloodstream intact, readily available to all of our cells. We lost the ability to make it ourselves, without becoming extinct, because we didn’t need to make it. And more than that, we reproduced faster than our associates who had not lost the ability to make it.”
― Kary Mullis, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field

“What sets a canoeing expedition apart,” Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in an essay a quarter century before he became Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, “is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“Kotcheff recalled after a northern trek with Trudeau. “He was by far the best dish-washer, fire-maker and camp organizer. He put some of us to shame.… Not only was he fit, he turned out to be one of the best canoeists and sternsmen in the group. If anyone succumbed to the elements, it wouldn’t be Pierre.”
― Roy MacGregor, Canoe Country: The Making of Canada

“Split a young ash sapling a few feet down its trunk. At sunrise, pass the child through the cleft, three to nine times, against the sun. Then bind the tree and plaster the fissure with mud or clay. If the tree fares well, so will the child.”
― Arthur Plotnik, The Urban Tree Book: An Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town

“The international code for signalling with a whistle is: One blast – Where are you? Two blasts – Come to me Three blasts – I need help Response – One blast”
― Ray Mears, Out on the Land: Bushcraft Skills from the Northern Forest