Best 73 quotes in «outdoors quotes» category

He decides it is better to die in Ireland than in Paris because in Ireland the outdoors looks like the outdoors and gravestones are mossy and chipped, and the letters wear down with the wind and the rain so everyone gets forgotten in time, and life flies on.

He knew for a fact that he was so hopelessly bad at seeing through camouflage that, if left alone in the forest, he might even attempt to make fire by rubbing two snakes together.

He stood there a moment, listened to the creek, and let the mountain air blow against his face. Even with all this heartache, it was beautiful here.

Hiking is not escapism; it's realism. The people who choose to spend time outdoors are not running away from anything; we are returning to where we belong.

I don't like either the word [hike] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

I realize that in giving birth, managing a household, raising a child, and composting potato peels in a city, I have learned some things about wildness that even Thoreau could not have known.

I know you find your banishment from court hard, but, believe me, it could be much, much worse. This is not a true prison. You can come out here to the garden and see the sky and listen to the birds singing and the bees humming in the flowers. You can work with your own two hands and see things you have planted grow and bring beauty to the world. You can eat what you have grown, and that is a joy too. Then there is the music and the singing, which is a balm to the soul, and the convent itself is filled with beauty, the soaring pillars and the windows glowing like jewels and the embroidered tapestries.

I’m likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.

In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.

In this ever changing world, there are few things that have remained constant for me. The chance of hooking a nice trout still excites and thrills me to this day....just as it did when I was a kid. I like that!

I routinely use my blue sky "Device" and it works very well for me.

I looked across at Alex and a wicked twinkle appeared in his eyes. “How is it that you’re still so sexy after all this time?” he mused. I shrugged my shoulders and raised an eyebrow but remained silent, a lascivious smile creeping across my features. I teased the strap of my dress slightly off the shoulder and he growled. He dipped a hand underneath the table and reached for my knee, pushing my dress up as far as he could. It appeared he had just remembered that I had chosen not to wear any underwear. I quickly devoured the last of the Champagne as the waitress appeared and ushered us to our table.

I'm looking for kindling kids...don't follow me.

I never knew I liked to be outside so much. I never knew I liked lochs and views and that, but I could seriously handle living in a cottage by the side of somewhere like this." The Panopticon

I stand holding the apple in both hands. It feels precious, like a heavy treasure. I lift it up and smell it. It has such an odour of outdoors on it I want to cry.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t live here, that a relationship was out of the question. It was probably because a relationship wouldn’t happen that he could let himself get this close. He wrapped his arms tighter around her as though this were all that existed in the world. Just the two of them, the mountain, the clean winter air. The taste of her tongue on his lips.

It can't be more than a quarter of a mile to the finish, but it seems to go on forever. Do I really have to do this? My legs are entirely dead. Would it really matter if I stopped here? But I know I'd regret it if I did, so I plod leadenly on, distracting myself...with the thought that, whatever troubles I may have been carrying around in my head before the race, I have now entirely forgotten what they were. This thought is rather refreshing. Whatever physical pains it has involved, this ordeal has utterly absorbed me, forcing my brain to focus on the kind of concerns for which it evolved - navigation, survival, balance, digging deep - rather than on the fretful urban anxieties to which it has become habituated. Reconnecting with your inner animal, I suppose you could call it; and it feels good. Especially when, blissfully, I catch sight of the finish.

I was well on the way to tacking together a sort of nature religion to make up fro Grandpa's defection, an apotheosis of the back of beyond, in which I was just another thinking thing, neuter, drab, camouflaged. There'd be sermons in stones, and books to read in the haybarn, for ever and ever. Amen.

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...

It should be expected that we will find wonder in a vast mountain landscape, but it is a more serious challenge to find wonder in a hill. It is a great achievement to find it in a molehill.

LOSE YOURSELF IN A BOOK, FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE

Live bold, without fear. This is life amongst the deer.

Most people spend less time outside than prisoners.

Nature's lessons are hard to learn. Harder still is it to translate Nature's lessons to others. Beside, the appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things ... by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion. If, in these pages, there are scattered speculations semi-mystical, semi-intelligible, perhaps even transcending the boundaries of rigid logic, I must simply aver that i put in writing that only which was given me to say.

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.

Never have I thought so much, never have I realised my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself ... as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place ; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work. The sight of the country, the succession of beautiful scenes ... releases my soul, gives me greater courage of thought, throws me as it were into the midst of the immensity of the objects of Nature ... my heart, surveying one object after another, unites itself, identifies itself with those in sympathy with it, surrounds itself with delightful images, intoxicates itself with emotions the most exquisite.

On a winter’s day when a person’s spirits may be low and to behold thirty to one-hundred Evening Grosbeaks busily gorging themselves on bird seed and perched in a stand of pines with all of them creating a cacophony of sparrow like chirps, this is real therapy for me. It is an act of contagious optimism. It is at such times I realize that a bird can do more for me than a shrink.

No animal could change the character of the land as the presence of the wolf had that day.

No single mountain ever came to me... so I always go to them

Oftentimes, it’s only when we are in the wilds, amidst nature, when we are challenged to reconnect with our main primal needs – finding shelter, water, and food, and working together with the environment – that a real sense of living comes back to us. This does not just happen to me, but by observation, to everyone who finds themselves once again among the wilds. For me, adventures aren’t just about doing something crazy, but rather about connecting with forgotten core elements of life. In effect, the single feeling that many people seek, but can’t seem to find anywhere else, returns – and that is the feeling of being alive.

Scholars, I plead with you, Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?

Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.

Outside, the dogs whine over the wind. They sense the wolves - they sense the wild. It calls to them, like it calls to me, and I wonder sometimes if we are the only ones who hear it.

Should humans conquer the mountain or should they wish for the mountain to possess them?

Slowly he f**ks my arse, pushing himself in and out of me. The sensation is so intense. I feel like my inner slut has finally been freed, and I revel in her carnal abandonment; throwing my head back while Mike rides me like an animal.

Simply is as simply does

The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.

Smart people that like good health spend several hours outdoors daily in the shade of trees.

Sometimes, when we are far from clocks and schedules, we can still recapture a lost sense of place-based time. On a relaxing camping trip or a long day outdoors, perhaps, we can slip back into the rhythm of the sun.

so wondrous wild, the whole might seem the scenery of a fairy dream

Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great paean of Being that Nature chants ... Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines - these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life ... Alas, that so fear hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!

Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.

The human body when kept in an indoor environment of low lux light will not realize that it is daytime, as it cannot sense the increasing levels of daylight that the genetics are accustomed to. As such, by late morning your body may start sending a signal for you to sleep!

The need for wildness is written within our genes, in a language we are just beginning to understand. And in wilderness we will find the Rosetta Stone that can unravel this ancient language of our bones.

...those who think their God ... has nowhere so plainly shown himself as in his works, will seek in the face and lineaments of Nature that consoling smile which every lonely soul so miserably craves ... betake thee to the fields; betake thee to the woods ... thou shalt be comforted ... Lay thy tired head on Nature's breast ... always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee ...

There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.

The wild unbounded hills we ranged, While oft our talk its topic changed, And, desultory as our way, Ranged, unconfined from grave to gay. Even when it flagg'd , as oft will chance, No effort made to break its trance, We could right pleasantly pursue Our thoughts in social silence too

Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness

There are no new themes for a writer, only new ways of setting down old themes, new eyes to wander among old rocks.