Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.
We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Everyone needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.
The longest journey begins with a single step, not with the turn of an ignition key. That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t much matter whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home. Right where you started.
Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, _A Piece of My Mind_; _The Cold War and the Income Tax_; the introduction to _Patriotic Gore_.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.
I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.
The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.
The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life -- if I live that long.
Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully -- as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.
There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last
Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.
To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?
I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.
Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.
I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made -- unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.
Places: a cold, bleak, lonely day on the rim at Muley Point, Utah. And the heart-cracking loveliness of the blood-smeared, bitter, incomprehensible slaughterhouse of a world.
What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
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