Awareness Quotes

"Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?"

- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

"The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark."

- John Muir

"It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way."

- Cheryl Strayed

"How can I claim to a greater importance than these alpine flowers, than anything that lives here, or even than the very rocks which eventually become the nourishing soil from which it all has to start? The existence of souls in men? And who can tell me the souls do not take up residence in plants and animals, and even these waters and rocky peaks? A higher evolution for the souls in men? So does that make us more important? Everything has its place, everything supports everything else, everything is important to itself- to its own development- and to that which it supports. That a humanoid god willed all this into existence simply to glorify himself -a bit too egotistically human- and or for us, his greatest creation, and our pleasure, use or misuse, seems not either to fit with the way I perceive the world while living close to it here at Little Five Lakes. I wish only to be alive and to experience this living to the fullest, to feel deeply about my days, to feel the goodness of life and the beauty of my world … this is my preference. I am human, and experience the emotions of humanity: elation, frustration, loneliness, love. And the greatest of these is love. Love for the world and its creatures. Love for life. It comes easily here. I have loved a thousand alpine meadows and mountain peaks. To be thoroughly aware each day that I am alive, to be deeply sensitive to the world I inhabit and the world that I am , not to roam rough shot of the surface of this planet for achievement but to know where I step and to tread lightly. I would rather my footsteps never be seen and the sound of my voice only be heard by those near and never echo, than leave in my wake the fame of those whom we commonly call great."

- Randy Morgenson

"There is a world out there, and you have got to look at both sides of the mountain in your lifetime."

- Bill Janklow

"Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder’s frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain."

- Haruki Murakami

""Mountains teach that not everything in this world can be rationally explained.""

- Aleksander Lwow

""Only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.""

- Richard M. Nixon

"Whatever you do, DO NOT EAT the free pistachio ice cream! It has TURNED."

- Tow Mater

"Race cars don't have phones, Cruz."

- Lightning McQueen

"My electronic personal assistant. You know, like on your phone. You have a phone, don't you?"

- Cruz Ramirez

"Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view."

- Yoda

"Hard to see, the dark side is."

- Yoda

"The dark side clouds everything. Impossible to see, the future is."

- Yoda

"Powerful you have become. The dark side I sense in you."

- Yoda

"Always in motion, is the future."

- Yoda

"Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future."

- Yoda

"You can observe a lot by just watching."

- Yogi Berra

"Baseball is like church. Many attend, but few understand."

- Leo Ernest Durocher

"The Silence of a shut park does not sound like the country silence: it is tense and confirmed."

- Elizabeth Bowen

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."

- Douglas P. Wheeler

"The weight of our civilization has become so great, it now ranks as a global force and a significant wild card in the human future along with the Ice Ages and other vicissitudes of a volatile and changeable planetary system"

- Dianne Dumanoski

"Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."

- Robert Frost

"We are the environment and how we treat each other is really how we treat the environment."

- John Francis

"The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"If we wait for the meek to inherit the earth there won’t be anything left to inherit."

- Bob Hunter

"The trouble is you think you have time."

- Buddha

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."

- John Kenneth Galbraith

"There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there."

- Bill McKibben

"From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change."

- David Suzuki