“I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth that it was true, I said it anyway: No one.”
"Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life."
- Cheryl Strayed
Awareness
"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
Awareness
"But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got."
- Cheryl Strayed
Compassion
"Compassion is about giving all the love that you’ve got."
- Cheryl Strayed
Compassion
"Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was."
- Cheryl Strayed
Self-awareness
"The youth of this generation have a greater capacity for obedience than any previous generation."
- Elder David A. Bednar
Strength
"He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior."
- Confucius
Strength
"The pain you feel today will show itself as strength tomorrow."
- Tunde Oyeneyin
Strength
"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will."
- Mahatma Gandhi
Strength
"Strength is the product of struggle, you must do what others don’t to achieve what others won’t."
- Henry Rollins
Strength