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#1

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

tags: grace, landscape, nature, seeing, spirituality

202 likes

#2

“Now, wilderness can be seen as a useful fiction, a fiction constructed by John Muir and his heirs and deployed to keep places from being destroyed by resource extraction and wholesale development.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

tags: 247, landscape, wilderness

6 likes

#3

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.”
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place : Letters and Essays on Travel

tags: 16, landscape, new-journalism, place, travel

53 likes

#4

“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
― Dogen

268 likes

#5

“It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.”
― Ken Kesey, Kesey's Garage Sale

tags: enlightenment, existence

1518 likes

#6

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: enlightenment, freedom, peace

298 likes

#7

“Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.”
― Peter Deunov

tags: awakened, enlightenment, happiness, inner-peace, self-fulfillment, wisdom

202 likes

#8

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

tags: dying, facts, fame, knowing, love, poverty, reality, school, teach, wealth

18635 likes

#9

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
― Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa

tags: inspiration, love, medicine, poverty, spirituality, uncaring

1737 likes

#10

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
― Immanuel Kant

tags: contentment, poverty, riches

1195 likes

#11

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

tags: escape, life, therapy, writing

689 likes

#12

“The problem with escaping is that we leave behind us, even among those we love, different versions of the truth and everything we couldn’t bring ourselves to say.”
― Frederick Weisel

tags: escape, frederick-weisel, love, teller, truth, weisel

9 likes

#13

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

2027 likes

#14

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

tags: books, needs, stories, storytelling, writing

4557 likes

#15

“People think dreams aren't real just because they aren't made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.”
― Neil Gaiman

5103 likes

#16

“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire

tags: dance, faeries, mountains, wind, world

977 likes

#17

“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”
― C. JoyBell C.

tags: brotherhood, color, difference, differences, equality, harmony, human, humanism, humanity, individuality, inspiration, inspirational, inspirational-life, inspirational-quotes, life, life-and-living, living, race, respect, sisterhood, society, unity

586 likes

#18

“People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people”
― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

tags: memory, songs, stories

29 likes

#19

“Thinking. This book contains some. Whether you try it at home is up to you.”
― Terry Pratchett, Nation

52 likes

#20

“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

tags: children, fairies, fantasy, loss-of-innocence, poetry, sorrow

1426 likes

#21

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

1651 likes

#22

“To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer.”
― Ansel Adams

tags: landscape, landscapes, photography

493 likes

#23

“Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

21 likes

#24

“To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

tags: mystery, wanderlust

169 likes

#25

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

195 likes

#26

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”
― Czesław Miłosz

tags: humility, learning, life, self-knowledge

249 likes

#27

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

tags: poetry

187 likes

#28

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

tags: beauty, birds, nature, poetry, shore, woods

5492 likes

#29

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

tags: flood, river, time, water, words

781 likes

#30

“I like geography best, he said, because your mountains & rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.”
― Brian Andreas, Story People

tags: boundaries, geography, jared-wheat, mountain, mountains, no-boundaries, paying-attention, personal-boundaries, river, rivers, secret, secret-of-life, secrets, the-biggest-secret

140 likes

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