Freedom

Together, we shall write an American story of hope, not fear. Of unity, not division. Of light, not darkness. A story of decency and dignity. Love and healing. Greatness and goodness. May this be the story that guides us.

- President Joe Biden, at his 2021 January Inauguration. This was two weeks after Trump supporter’s violent insurrection at the U.S. Capital building.

Injustice anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.  
- Abraham Lincoln

The idea that some lives matter less, is the root of all that is wrong with the world.
- Paul Farmer

The question isn't who's going to let me, it's who is going to stop me.
- Ayn Rand, author

Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing, the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude to any given set of circumstances, to choose one's way.
- Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor

The memory of oppressed people cannot be taken away, 
and for such people revolt is always an inch below the surface.
- Howard Zinn (1922-2010.  American historian, political science professor at Boston University playwright and social activist)

I am no longer accepting the things I can not change, I am changing the things I can not accept!

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the Mountaineer.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their freshness into you and the storms their energy, while your cares drop off like autumn leaves.
- John Muir

The most common way people give up their power, is by thinking they don't have any.
- Alice Walker, author

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Hurt

One of the hardest things you will ever have to do, my dear, is to grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.
- Unknown

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.
- - Maya Angelou

What wound did ever heal but by degrees? 

- - Shakespeare Othello

Life isn’t always ideal or romantic. It’s a series of triumphs and disappointments, and that’s okay.  The best we can do is open our hearts and learn to appreciate and forgive.  
- - Turning Point,” by Adrian Grenier (1976 - ) Reader’s Digest, June 2007.  Actor, HBO’s “Entourage.”

Grief is an ocean.
Abbreviated from others' quotes likening grief and its process to oceans and waves.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as like lasts.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.  

- Rachel Carson

Direction

If we don’t change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
- - Chinese Proverb

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.

- - Beverly Sills 

First say to yourself, what would you be, and then do what you have to do.

- - Epictetus (55 - 135 AD)

A boat is safe in the harbor. But this is not the purpose of a boat.
- - Paulo Coelho, author

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
- - Dr. Seuss

Dream

A person is only as big as the dream they dare to live.
- - Unknown

Cherish your visions and dreams are they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate accomplishments.
- - Napolean Hill

To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life.  The money is the gravy.
- - Bette Davis

The two most important days in your life are the day you were born, and the day you find out why.
- - Mark Twain

Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations.
- Mae Jemison, first black female astronaut to travel to space

Change

Be the change you want to see in the world.

- Gandhi

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
- Maya Angelou

Why try so hard to fit it, if you were born to stand out?
- adapted from 2003 Movie "What a Girl Wants" with Amanda Byrnes

I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that.  Then I realized I was somebody.
- Lily Tomlin

I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of those people who live what they teach, who walk their talk. 
- Tony Robbins, motivational speaker

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
- John Ruskin

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It's not.  
- Dr. Seuss

Travel

When people think of travel, they often think long-distance; but the benefits of travel also and very much apply to local travel!
_____
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes; but in having new ideas.
- Marcel Proust

Jobs fill your pockets.  Adventures fill your soul.
- Jaime Lyn Beatty

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
- Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as: Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light.  Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
- Glenn Clark

In order to discover new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

- Andre Gide (1869ˆ1951) French Writer

When we tire of well-worn ways we seek for new.  This restless craving in the souls of men spurs them to climb and to seek the mountain view.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1815 - 1919), American author and poet

Earth does not belong to us.  We belong to Earth.  Take only memories.  Leave nothing but footprints.

- Chief Seattle

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.  And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.  We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
- John Steinbeck

I now belong to a higher cult of mortals, for I have seen the albatross.
- Robert Cushman Murphy

Anger

Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.

- - Epictetus

Adversity

We learn the ropes of life by untying knots.  

- Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hours of adversity.

- Elizabeth Guizot

What ought one say then as each hardship comes?  I was practicing for this.  I was training for this.
- Epictetus (55 - 135AD)

Sometimes you don't get closure, you just move on.
- Karen Salmansohn

I've never met a strong person with an easy past.
- Unknown

Just when the night was at its longest, darkest, and seemingly most interminable point, there came the calling of these amazing creatures to each. “Ok over here. Ok over there?” “ Yes, all set over here.” We really are not alone, even at the darkest part of our real, or figurative night.
- Helen Mae

You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.

- Bob Marley

For us, warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who can not provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity.

-Oceti Sakowin Camp quoting: Sitting Bull 12/02/2016 during Dakota Pipeline crisis

Boom - P.O.D. “Is that all you got? Take your best shot?”

Persistence

"Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." 
-- Ray Kroc, McDonald's

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
--Theodore Roosevelt

Death

I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you; but instead, I am deeply honored knowing you spent the rest of your life with me.
- Camille Marcotte

Grief is an ocean.
Abbreviated from others' quotes likening grief and its process to oceans and waves.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as like lasts.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.  
- Rachel Carson

Nature

Is it my soul that soars with them in religious rapture or just ornithological euphoria? They are the crescendo's end, the peak of perfection, an avian art-form.
- Grumpy Old Birder (podcast)

Thank God man cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

Water is the driving force of all nature. (aka "Water is life." Standing Rock 2016)
- Leonardo da Vinci

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

We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea by indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough nature.
- Henry David Thoreau 

It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilized world.
- Robert F. Scott (1868-1912)


Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
- Rachel Carson

Those who contemplate the beauty of earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
- Rachel Carson

but love the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond ready; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see."  
-Edward Abbey

Wopila is an important virtue and philosophy for living the Lakota way of life, and means "everything around you is a gift and never forget where it comes from, your heart."

We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
- Chief Seattle?

Earth does not belong to us.  We belong to Earth.  Take only memories.  Leave nothing but footprints.
- Chief Seattle?

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- David Thoreau, Walden (1854) 

There are not too many places more powerful than the Galapagos Islands when it comes to understanding our planet.
- Jeff Corwin

People protect what they love.
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997)

How can people protect what they don't understand.
- Jean-Michel Cousteau & restated in TED Talk by grandson, Fabien Cousteau 

The time to protect a species is while they are still common.
Rosalie Barrow Edge (1877 - 1962)

The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.
- Robert Swan

The scientist does not study nature because its useful; he (she) studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.  If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.

- Jules Henri Poincare (1854-1912)

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on the land is invisible to layman. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
- Aldo Leopold

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water.  Don't sit this one out.  Do something.
- - Carl Sagan

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.  There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - that assurance that dawn comes after night and spring after winter.
- - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

There is a romance in Africa.  You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God.  You watch the lope of a lioness and forget to breath.  You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water.  In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature.  In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere.  When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.  Given that sort of setting, is it any wonder that recollections might be rose colored?
- Jodi Picoult in her book 'Leaving Time'

You should sit in nature for 20 minutes a day.  If you're busy, then you should sit for an hour.
- Zen meditation

We must alert and organize the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth  and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources.  Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.
- Jacques Cousteau (1910 - 1997)

We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilized world. 
Robert F. Scott , Explorer (1868-1912)

Difference

You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

- Jane Goodall

The best use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.

- William James, author

I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.

- Mother Teresa

Animals

Animals

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
- Mahatma Gandhi

No where else on Earth is God’s artistry more apparent than in the animal kingdom

- De Stafano

Animals have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance.  There is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

- John Henry Newman

Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.

- Aldo Leopold

The love for all living creatures is the most notable attribute of man.
- Charles Darwin

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?

- Aldo Leopol

Is it my soul that soars with them in religious rapture, or just ornithological euphoria?
They are the crescendo's end, the peak of perfection, and avian art-form.
GOB 100 - Birding (Grumpy Old Birder's podcast)

The difference between a beginning birder and an experienced one is that beginning birders having misidentified few birds, Experienced birders have misidentified thousands. 
- Pete Dunne.