A list of quotes and or small thoughts/phrases that I enjoy. Many have been pulled from books I have read, while others I have heard in person or found online.
"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less"
- Socrates
"When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money"
- A Cree Native American
"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life... To put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I had come to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
"I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse."
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
"I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news"
- John Muir
"The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth."
- Chief Seattle
"What is significant is that when you live in the woods, rather than just visiting them, the beauty becomes part of your life rather than something you just look at from the outside."
- Ted Kaczynski
"In living close to nature, one discovers that happiness does not consist in maximizing pleasure. It consists in tranquility. Once you have enjoyed tranquility long enough, you acquire actually an aversion to the thought of any very strong pleasure--excessive pleasure would disrupt your tranquility."
- Ted Kaczynski
"When the time comes for a man to look his Maker in the eye, where better could the meeting be held than in the wilderness?"
- Dick Proenneke
"The rest is scenery. Which keeps floating past before you can get the feel of it, or even a good look at it. But that's the price we pay for keeping on schedule. The lifespan of modern techno-industrial man must be the shortest in human history. Or does it only seem that way?"
- Edward Abbey, Down the River
"The man who goes each day to the village to hear the latest news has not heard from himself in a long time"
- Henry David Thoreau
"The human being is delivered helpless, in respect to life's most important and most trivial affairs, to a power which is in no sense under his control. For there can be no question today of man's con trolling the milk he drinks or the bread he eats, any more than of his controlling his government."
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
"It will be inadmissible for any part of the individual not to be integrated in the drive toward technicization; it will be inadmissible that any man even aspire to escape this necessity of the whole society. The individual will no longer be able, materially or spiritually, to disengage himself from society. Materially, he will not be able to release himself because the technical means are so numerous that they invade his whole life and make it impossible for him to escape the collective phenomena. There is no longer an uninhabited place, or any other geographical locale, for the would-be solitary... It is vain to aspire to live alone when one is obliged to participate in all collective phenomena and to use all the collective's tools, without which it is impossible to earn a bare subsistence. Nothing is gratis any longer in our society..."
- Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
"Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of spring?"
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
"When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
"The modern dogma is comfort at any cost."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
"Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
"Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days."
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
"There is all the difference in the world between looking at something and living with it. In nature, one never really sees a thing for the first time until one has seen it for the fiftieth. It never means much until it has become not a 'view' or a 'sight' but an integrated world of which one is a part"
- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
"...[T]he rare moment is not the moment when there is something worth looking at but the moment when we are capable of seeing"
- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
"...Thoreau knew that when the light of common day seemed no more than common it was because of something lacking in [him], not because of something lacking in it, and what [he] asked for was eyes to see a universe [he] knew was worth seeing"
- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
"When ranch visitors amuse themselves by lassoing the saguaros and pull over a giant which has been a century and a half in growing, that is merely another illustration of the fact that of all living creatures man is the most dangerous--to everything else that lives, as well as to himself"
- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Desert Year
"Many of us are so constituted that we never use our eyes until we are on foreign soil"
- E. V. Lucas
"Why do you stay here and live this mean, moiling life, when a glorious existance is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these."
- Henry David Thoreau
"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free"
- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself"
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"[I]t is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being"
- John Stuart Mill
"I don't understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism, but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress"
- Ed Begley Jr
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable"
- Socrates
"I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself"
- Rita Mae Brown
"People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
- Aldous Huxley
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life-and only then will I be free to become myself"
- Martin Heidegger
"It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own"
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
"You'll stop worrying what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do"
- David Foster Wallace
"Of course, we better not stop, otherwise, we'll have time to think, do introspection, deal with silence - and that is, indeed, scary."
- Raul, minim.blog
"...[W]e are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it... Life is long if you know how to use it"
- Sceneca
"The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."
- Epicurus
"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity"
- Terry A. Davis
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"
- Blaise Pascal
"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Anyone can see that the pleasure of getting does not translate into the pleasure of having"
- Ran Prieur