Tim > Tim's Quotes

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Christopher McCandless

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“Not blind opposition to progress,but opposition to blind progress...”
― John Muir

“One should go to the woods for safety, if for nothing else.”
― John Muir, Our National Parks

“This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!”
― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

“Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”
― Edward Abbey

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.”
― Edward Abbey

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”
― Edward Abbey

“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
― Edward Abbey

“Freedom begins between the ears.”
― Edward Abbey

“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.”
― Edward Abbey

“I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.”
― Edward Abbey

“The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.”
― Edward Abbey

“The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need, if only we had the eyes to see.”
― Edward Abbey

“I despise my own nation most. Because I know it best. Because I still love it, suffering from Hope. For me, that's patrotism.”
― Edward Abbey, The Serpents of Paradise: A Reader

“When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.”
― Edward Abbey

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
― Edward Abbey

“When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.”
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

“From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.”
― Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal

“I've got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“Congress is always willing to appropriate money for more and bigger paved roads, anywhere -- particularly if they form loops.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.”
― Edward Abbey