[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 book

the movie

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.)

[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 book

the movie

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.

“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.”

I came across this old saying the other day…

“I complained because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet. “

I can’t believe this is nowhere in my old reading notebooks or in the blog — I just searched around and could not find it, but here is one of my all time favorite quotes:

“Love” is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.

-Jubal Harshaw, Stranger in a Strange Land

I was at a wedding last weekend in which the best man’s toast included this quote. The toast was probably the best I’ve ever heard, and of course I love the reference to this quote, as I always use it in my definition of love…

On a side note that made me chuckle, one of the guys on a table next to us said “Robert who??”

Sigh… Only the grandfather of SciFi…