Best 10 quotes of Steven Callahan on MyQuotes

A view of heaven from a seat in hell.

Avoiding risk is not much of a goal...whether you crawl into a hole or walk a high wire, nobody gets out of here alive. We cannot grow without challenge.

Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on.

My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness.

There is a magnificent intensity in life that comes when we are not in control but are only reacting, living, surviving. I am not a religious man per se...but for me, to go to sea is to get a glimpse of the face of God. At sea I am reminded of my insignificance-of all men's insignificance. It is a wonderful feeling to be so humbled.

The sea remains the greatest wilderness. To my mind, voyaging through wildernesses, be they full of woods or waves, is essential to the growth and maturity of the human spirit.

This life is full of trials and tribulations, so you have to capture humor whenever and wherever you can find it.

If there is any enlightenment that I have been awakened to, it is that men's minds are dominated by their little aches and pains. We want to think that we are more than that, that we control our live with intellect. But now, without civilization clouding the issue, I wonder to what extent intellect is controlled by instinct and culture is the result of raw gut reactions to life.

I have often thought that my instincts were the fools that allowed me to survive so that my "higher functions" could continue. Now I am finding that it is more the other way around. It is my ability to reason that keeps command and allows me to survive, and the things I am surviving for are those that I want by instinct: life, companionship, comfort, play.

To us decay is death, but to nature it is another beginning.