"Often the idea of change is more difficult than the change itself." — Sarah Marquis Wild by Nature: From Siberia to Australia, Three Years Alone in the Wilderness on Foot
"Well shit, at least you tried." — Unknown
"Worrying that you are crap is a waste of time. Worrying that you can’t do it is a waste of time. Worrying that you failed is a waste of time. No one cares. Just get on with it." — Peter Capaldi
"Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Suffering is ultimately created by a resistance to what is, by a sense that the universe owed you something different than what you got, that things were supposed to be a different way." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." — Wayne Dyer
"Or you could rise. That 'or' is always available to us, no matter how vehemently we pretend it’s not." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"You are refined, not defined, by defeat." — Aaron Eveland
"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default." — JK Rowling Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
"However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far removed from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown." — JK Rowling Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
"It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand." — Madeleine L'Engle The Summer of the Great-Grandmother
"Failure is only failure if you fail to learn from it." — Unknown
"Public lands instruct in the value of respecting differences. We may all be endowed with a love of nature, but that passion takes many forms. Public lands must accommodate multiple uses because there are multiple publics whose wishes point in all directions. … Such differences don’t have to fester into divisions. The duck hunter and the birdwatcher may have their own ideas about the highest value of a wetland. Yet both know that without public protection, there might not be a wetland at all…. America’s public lands teach the etiquette of sharing. They instruct is in the manners of coexistence, cooperation, and consideration toward each other. … Such humility can remind us that even though we may find the culture and politics of others to be incomprehensible, their desire to find happiness in the natural world is much the same as our own." — Jason Mark Sierra Magazine, July/August 2020 Issue, "In Public Lands is the Preservation of the Republic"
"There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." — John F. Kennedy
"To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn’t match the plan. In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too. Under the influence of a plan, it’s easy to see what we want to see." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"Rational (or conscious) thought always lags behind the emotional reaction." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"What we see often has more to do with what we have seen in the past or what we hope or expect to see than it does with what is staring us in the face." — Jill Fredston Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another." — John Burroughs
"In the inner workings of his brain, he had tagged it a happy, rewarding place. (Ali: the opposite is also true)" — Jill Fredston Snowstruck: In the Grip of Avalanches
"Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean." — Lydia Davis Can't and Won't, "Housekeeping Observation"
