Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.

– Anatole France

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

– John Muir (via Thought for the Day)

To inhabit a place means literally to have made it a habit, to have made it the custom and ordinary practice of our lives, to have learned how to wear a place like a familiar garment, like the garments of sanctity that nuns once wore.The word habit, in its now-dim original form, meant “to own.” We own places not because we possess the deeds to them, but because they have entered the continuum of our lives.

– Paul Gruchow (via Lifescapes)

The question is not whether land belongs to us, through titles registered in a courthouse, but whether we belong to the land, through our loyalty and awareness. . . In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world.

Scott Russell Sanders (via Lifescapes)

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

– Steven Wright

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

– Charles Dickens, from David Copperfield

The task of genius, and humanity is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegiance to nothing, but live only miraculously, think only miraculously, die miraculously.

– Henry Miller

There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms.

– Kevin P. Phillips

This thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.

– Abu Yazid al-Bistami

Beauty is more important than impact. Harmony is more important than intensity. The whole of any wine must always be more than the sum of its parts. Distinctiveness is more important than conventional prettiness. Soul is more important than anything, and soul is expressed as a trinity of family, soil and artisanality. Lots of wines, many of them good wines, let you taste the noise. But only the best let you taste the silence.

– Terry Theise

You can play this kind of moral sudoku — finding the patterns — with the obituaries every day. Look at those summary lives. See how they fit together — or not. How far into their backgrounds do you have to go before they start to converge? How far before you find yourself in a world of utterly different expectations?

– Verlyn Klinkenborg

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

– Robert Brault

A journal as an experiment in consciousness. An attempt to record not just the external world, and not just the vagrant, fugitive, ephemeral ‘thoughts’ that brush against us like gnats, but the refractory and involable authenticity of daily life: daily-ness, day-ness, day-lightness, the day’s eye of experience.

– Joyce Carol Oates

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be.

– Abraham Maslow

Dance in the body you have.

– Agnes DeMille

When Reb Zusye went to heaven, God didn’t ask him why, in his life on earth, Zusye wasn’t Moses, but why he wasn’t even Zusye.

– Gerald Sorin

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.

– Henry Ward Beecher

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

– Benjamin Franklin

Iced tea is too pure and natural a creation not to have been invented as soon as tea, ice, and hot weather crossed paths.

– John Egerton

We don’t make a photograph just with a camera, we bring to the act of photography all the books we have read, the movies we have seen, the music we have heard, the people we have loved.

– Ansel Adams

Teaching is overemphasized in our society. Learning is the thing. Teaching doesn’t automatically result in learning. Learning requires love and desire, and when you have that, anything and everybody is a teacher.

– Harland Hubbard

Death steals everything except our stories.

– Jim Harrison

Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.

– Gary Snyder

If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.

– Raymond Inmon

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.

– Albert Einstein

Life is a beautiful, horrific braiding of events. We stand at the mouth of the river and the eye of the storm, that place where rainbows are seen. Difficult days, we tread water. Glorious days, we fly.

– Elizabeth Westmark

To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

~ Timothy Leary