Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. -CS Lewis
Retire into yourself as much as possible. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one. People learn as they teach.
— Seneca
I believe that we are here for each other, not against each other. Everything comes from an understanding that you are a gift in my life - whoever you are, whatever our differences.
— John Denver
The ideal in the Lieh-Tzu is a state, not of withdrawal, but of heightened perceptiveness and responsiveness in an undifferentiated world. My mind concentrated and my body relaxed, bones and flesh fused completely, I drifted with the wind East or West, like a leaf from a tree or a dry husk, and never knew whether it was the wind that rode me or I that rode the wind.
— The Book of Lieh-Tzu
One cries because one is sad. For example, I cry because others are stupid. And that makes me sad.
— Sheldon Cooper
Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature’s darlings. 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 off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature’s sources never fail.
— John Muir
This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: ‘I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.’
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Exactly. That’s what’s been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You’ve been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.
— Daniel Quinn,Ishmael
Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he’s done—almost. He hasn’t quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit—and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out—and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air…
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.
— Jane Goodall
