The devil’s best trick is to persuade us that he doesn’t exist, but Google only has to convince us that it’s not evil.
From this piece on SF Gate by Richard Bennett.
Funny Quote
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Category Archives: Reading Notebook
Wild at Heart. John Eldredge.
Regular readers will know that I have mentioned this book a lot over the past couple of months, as it has lead me to read other books and watch some movies. We did this as a men’s study at church, and wrapped up a while back, but I haven’t had a chance to write much on it yet. I really could write a lot about this book, and I had a ton of dog-eared pages to put in quotes, but I don’t think I will. Instead, I will make an interesting observation, and then list who I think should read this book.
Observation:
It was very interesting, but many of the men in our group did not like this book at all at the beginning, but loved it by the end. For me, I loved it from the beginning — in fact I had trouble not reading it all in a day or two. I did not want to do that as I wanted to read a chapter at a time to match up with our study schedule. I was instanly drawn into the outdoor adventure that Eldridge says all men desire. And any one that knows me knows I love the outdoors: hiking, back packing, mountain biking, camping, orienteering, and adventure racing. But it wasn’t just that. There were phrases like “the high country of the soul” that spoke to me — because “the high country of the mind” is used throughout Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of my all time favorites. And there was the famous Teddy Roosevelt quote on critics and the arena that seemed to come at me from many different sources all at the same time. And some of my favorite quotes from others like Thoreau…
Anyway, I would be interested in hearing from others who have read this to see if they were instantly hooked or if it took a while, and why you think that was so for you.
Who should read it:
- All Christian men (from mid teens all the way up!)
- Any man that has “spiritual longings” (or questions) whether Christian or not
- Any wife of a man that reads it (or better yet, after the husband has read it, read it together as a couple)
Kelly and I just started reading it together, and I look forward to continuing that!
One final point… Take the time to get the accompanying “Field Manual” and work through the questions in there. You will get much more out of it if you do that.
Earl Woods Quote…
I hope you got to see Tiger play in the US Open, and then hear afterwords how his knee was much worse than any of us thought at the time… It wasn’t just “a little sore” from surgery a few weeks prior — he was playing with a fractured tibia and a torn ACL. Rocco vs. Tiger was great to watch, but what we saw in Tiger was perhaps the most mentally tough person in all of sports history.
Before Tiger, I probably would have said Lance Armstrong was the most mentally tough. Lance was also amazingly tough in other ways — who comes back from cancer that bad to be the best athlete in the world at their given sport? Lance always impressed me as he was up for almost every big ride. I only saw him lose it once in 7 years of watching — and yes, I watched almost every TDF ride… But even more than that, the little things always impressed me with him. He was a master strategist in all the races, especially the big ones. But most of, he was always concentrating — never letting anything get by him. The number of times there was a crash all around him and he came out unscathed was amazing — and that only comes from paying attention.
But, back to Tiger… I have never seen anyone so mentally tough — able to will up the most incredible shots when most needed. And then to see him fight through pain to play good enough to win. I know a little about knee pain — when my knee got so bad that I fell to the ground trying to start a lawn mower, or later that day when I lifted my leg to see what was hurting, and again fell down in excruciating pain. No one other than Tiger knows how bad his pain was. But what was most amazing to me, was that he never knew when it was going to hit. He’d line up for a shot, and not know if sometime during the shot, or on the follow through, the knee was going to hurt. Yet he did it time after time after time.
And all that leads into the quote I wanted to record here… The commercial played during the tournament, where Wood’s dad Earl is talking, and finishes with the following quote, is amazing, for a couple of reasons…
1) The quote is so true… Tiger has to be the most mentally tough athelete I have ever seen. and
2) and the 1st part of the quote — “you don’t really instill anything in a child… you encourage the development of it..” I could write a whole post on this, and maybe will someday. 🙂
“‘I promise you that you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life.’
Ran across this on another blog…
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
— Thomas Carlyle
Quote from Into the Wild #4
[Update] I have been getting a lot of hits on the “quote from into the wild” posts — the ones like this that are just a quote without my personal context of the book and movie… So I am going to put in links to my posts on:
The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two become one in my mind. With the gather force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I face in myself a passionate and tenacious longing — to put away thought forever, and all the trouble it bring, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hilsls and their late freezing shadows — a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show me where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.
— John Hains. The Stars, The Snow, The Fire: Twenty-five years in the Northern Wilderness.
Quote from Into the Wild #3
[Update] I have been getting a lot of hits on the “quote from into the wild” posts — the ones like this that are just a quote without my personal context of the book and movie… So I am going to put in links to my posts on:
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why the write symphonies.. Now, you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment. And the basic elements of this equipment are in the Gospels. What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the hear of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And then two basic ideals of modern man — without them he is unthinkable — the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice.
Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhvago.
(McCandless underlined love of one’s neighbor, free personality, and life as sacrifice — I’ve used red and bold here.)
Quote from Into the Wild #2
[Update] I have been getting a lot of hits on the “quote from into the wild” posts — the ones like this that are just a quote without my personal context of the book and movie… So I am going to put in links to my posts on:
I cannot tell now exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone), — and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterraean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summitt above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summitt, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crate ofa volcano sprouting fire.
Thoreau. Journal.
(I get a similar feeling when I hike up mountains! What an amazing writer Thoreau is — he has a sublime way with words.)
Quote from Into the Wild #1
[Update] I have been getting a lot of hits on the “quote from into the wild” posts — the ones like this that are just a quote without my personal context of the book and movie… So I am going to put in links to my posts on:
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance , and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth, were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as the ices.
Thoreau — Walden.
Into the Wild. Jon Krakauer.
I read this years ago, apparently before I started keeping my “reading notebook” online in 2000, but I had to read it again after watching the movie recently. And I’ve been listening to the soundtrack more, which I started after seeing the movie. I didn’t listen to it that much when I first bought it, but it is apparent now that Eddie Vedder did a masterful job with the music and lyrics. He’s always been one of my favorite lyricists, but I did not have a real appreciation for this album until seeing the movie and now reading the book again.
The movie did a pretty good job keeping to the book’s story line, which it should since it is based on a true story. Of course, the book has more depth than the movie, but beyond that, it also has a couple chapters devoted to Krakauer’s own harrowing experience in the wild, as he attempted to climb the ice covered Devil’s Thumb — in winter — in which Mother Nature showed him who is boss. (And I’ve been there too!, though maybe not quite as bad.) But that added depth and reflection by Krakauer, and the relevance to McCandless’s own tale, which is left out of the movie, is well worth it.
The book also made me want to read Jack London, Tolstoy (which I have already purchased Family Happiness and is my next book in queue). I tried to read War and Peace a few years ago, and just never got in to it. I had to put it down after a couple hundred pages. McCandless speaks very highly of it … “powerful and highly symbolic” and “has things that escape most people” as he puts it. And it so happens that I sat next to a guy on a plane that was reading Anna Karina, and we talked about War and Peace, and he also said I need to pick it up again.
There are several great quotes Krakauer included, some of which made it into the movie. For this blog entry, I will include quotes from Krakauer and McCandless, but longer quotes from other authors I will put in their own blog entries.
…[don’t] fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.” — McCandless
Children can be harsh judges when it comes to their parents, disinclined to grant clemency….” — Krakauer
I used to get the trance like state of what he described below when racing sometimes, usually when paddling on the 2nd night of a 3-day race, and you become separated from your body. Krakauer was describing a long ice climb, though…
A trance-like state settles over your efforts, the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes [ !! interesting how he through this in !!] — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.
It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. — Krakauer
But I came to appreciate that mountains [ or whatever you are ‘pursuing’ ] make poor receptacles for dreams.
It is interesting how this theme, or variations on it, seems to keep coming up!
Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you. – McCandless
Happiness is only real when shared… — McCandless.
Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain.
I read this after Tom Sawyer… This is the 1st book in a while that I didn’t dog-ear any pages or find a quote to include here. It is not that I didn’t enjoy it — in fact, it had me laughing out loud at some points. Great, entertaining read. Some of the dialects are hard to read though.
2sparrows 