Favorite Quotes and Poems and Stories
| And I have felt | |
| A presence that disturbs me with the joy | |
| Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime | |
| Of something far more deeply interfused, | |
| Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, | |
| And the round ocean, and the living air, | |
| And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, | |
| A motion and a spirit, that impels | |
| All thinking things, all objects of all thought, | |
| And rolls through all things.From Lines Written A Few Miles Above the Tintern Abbey…… William Wordsworth |
“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
— Chuck Palahniuk (Diary)
“Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” Edward Abbey
“What happiness lacks in length, it makes up for in height” Robert Frost
I shall be coming back to you
From seas, rivers, sunny meadows,
Glens that hold secrets:
I shall come back with my hands full
Of light and flowers….
I shall bring back things I have picked up,
Traveling this road or the other,
Things found by the sea or in the pinewood.
There will be a pine-cone in my pocket,
Grains of pink sand between my fingers.
I shall tell you of a golden pheasant’s
Feather….
Will you know me?
Hilda Conkling, Age 10, 1922
*****
Hope Emily Dickinson
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
*****
On Happiness
People always say you have to make yourself happy. What goes into that? How does onemake oneself happy”
Short, easy description of a long, difficult process: Figure out the things that make you feel confident/fulfilled/energized; that give you a sense of purpose or accomplishment; that tap into your natural abilities and strengths; and that don’t put you at the mercy of any one person, and orient your life around those.
Often, this requires the separate step — concurrently or as a precursor — of reducing the role in your life of things that make you feel worthless/empty/exhausted; that don’t excite you; that require skills that don’t come naturally; that feel like a waste of time; or that put you routinely at the mercy of others.” Advice Column
*****
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
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Feb 2, 2010… Cathy shared this one with me!!
A Parable of Sauntering
by Albert W. Palmer
Excerpted from The Mountain Trail and Its Message (1911)
There is a fourth lesson of the trail. It is one which John Muir taught me [during an early Sierra Club outing].
There are always some people in the mountains who are known as “hikers.” They rush over the trail at high speed and take great delight in being the first to reach camp and in covering the greatest number of miles in the least possible time. they measure the trail in terms of speed and distance.
One day as I was resting in the shade Mr. Muir overtook me on the trail and began to chat in that friendly way in which he delights to talk with everyone he meets. I said to him: “Mr. Muir, someone told me you did not approve of the word ‘hike.’ Is that so?” His blue eyes flashed, and with his Scotch accent he replied: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike!
“Do you know the origin of that word ’saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way. He would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers. Usually he appeared at camp with some new flowers in his hat and a little piece of fir bough in his buttonhole.
Now, whether the derivation of saunter Muir gave me is scientific or fanciful, is there not in it another parable? There are people who “hike” through life. They measure life in terms of money and amusement; they rush along the trail of life feverishly seeking to make a dollar or gratify an appetite. How much better to “saunter” along this trail of life, to measure it in terms of beauty and love and friendship! How much finer to take time to know and understand the men and women along the way, to stop a while and let the beauty of the sunset possess the soul, to listen to what the trees are saying and the songs of the birds, and to gather the fragrant little flowers that bloom all along the trail of life for those who have eyes to see!
You can’t do these things if you rush through life in a big red automobile at high speed; you can’t know these things if you “hike” along the trail in a speed competition. These are the peculiar rewards of the man who has learned the secret of the saunterer!
Source: The Mountain Trail and Its Message (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1911)
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