"Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling." — Margaret Lee Runbeck
"There are things you can’t control, so you’d better know how you’re going to react to them." — Laurence Gonzales Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
"The less energy we waste in our own minds pointing fingers, the more energy we have to move powerfully in the direction we want to go." — Hilary Oliver Adventure Journal, "Learning Accountability From Mountains"
"You are not an idiot. It’s okay if you don’t know everything. Don’t pretend. Ask all the questions you want." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"People love to blame a place for their own failures." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"It wasn’t about winning. It was about fighting. Continuing the project of improvement. The intention and effort was what built character. Not success." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"I think he was quiet because his thoughts were loud." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"In 900 years of time and space, I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important." — 11th Doctor Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"
"Popular kids never grow up to be interesting and…interesting kids are never popular." — Lena Dunham Not That Kind of Girl
"Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it." — Vincent Van Gogh
"We all change, when you think about it. We’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be." — 11th Doctor Doctor Who, "The Time of the Doctor"
"I, too, want to create a cartography for my life that only I can draw. It's no longer that important to me to place a flag on a summit and check it off on my map. What matters most are the questions that I ask myself between each mountain, and the answers that lead me to the next one. I want to grow with the evolution of these lines and with the spaces between them." — Kazuya Hiraide, translated from Japanese by Hiko Ito Alpinist Magazine, Issue 75, "A Map of the Heart: From Shispare to Rakaposhi"
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." — Unknown
"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I actually was." — Cheryl Strayed Wild
"I spend a lot of my time moving at someone else’s pace, trying to accommodate, appease, and appeal. My personality is one that constantly needs to help, be supportive, be a quality team player, and to contribute as much as I can. It’s mostly satisfying, but if I get too absorbed in moving in others’ flow, I lose my own." — Ellysa Evans She Explores, "A Solo Camp for the Books"
"If you want to be someone who is brave, live with courage. If you want to be someone who is honest, tell the truth. If you want to be someone who is strong, do something that requires strength. Do those things and therefore become the kind of person who would do them. Wishing or aspiring to be a certain way does nothing. You must act. You must act that way until you are that way." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"It turns out there is a difference between wanting to be something and wanting to become something. Wanting to be something indicates a hope that somehow you will be struck by lightning and suddenly be that thing you wanted to be. Wouldn’t it be nice if I were suddenly, somehow, more outgoing, more confident. Hoping to be something is passive, and passivity gets you nowhere. Being is a state, and becoming is a process. And to be, you must become. Becoming requires work. Becoming requires action. Becoming means deciding you’re going to achieve something and taking real quantifiable steps in that direction." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"Saying something is impossible is a great way to get out of having to try." — Carolyn Highland Out Here: Wisdom from the Wilderness
"By taking off the pressure of having to excel at or master an activity, we allow ourselves to live in the moment. You might think this sounds simple enough, but living in the present is also something most of us suck at. Think about how focused you become when you’re presented with something totally new to accomplish. Now, what happens when that task is no longer new but still taps into intense focus because we haven’t yet mastered it? You’re a novice, an amateur, a kook. You suck at it. Some might think your persistence moronic. I like to think of it as meditative and full of promise. In the words of the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, 'In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.’ … By exposing ourselves to the experience of trying and failing we might develop more empathy. If we succeed in shifting from snap judgments to patience, maybe we could be a little more helpful to one another—and a whole lot more understanding. If we accept our failures and persevere nonetheless, we might provide a respite from the imperative to succeed and instead find acceptance in trying. Failing is O.K. Better still, isn’t it a relief?" — Karen Rinaldi New York Times, "(It’s Great to) Suck at Something"
"It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself being perfectly happy. It’s a worthy thing to ponder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, 'twixt two extremes of passion—joy and grief,' as Shakespeare put it. However much I’ve lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonders
