The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Women have a certain sexuality, and I think their bodies are beautiful, and I’m not embarrassed to explore that in a film. But there are things you get offered that are vulgar and violent – just like there’s a side of me that’s vulgar and violent.

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver five minutes longer.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

I love soccer, love tennis… Roger Federer has been a favourite for a long, long time. The kind of consistency he has shown, 16 Grand Slam titles… The way he handles himself in pressure situations is admirable… He is so calm… In soccer, I’m a huge fan of Barcelona… I like watching Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Everything is the product of one universal creative effort. There is nothing dead in Nature. Everything is organic and living, and therefore the whole world appears to be a living organism.

‚Victory Lap,‘ even the title. It’s the accumulation of trial and error; that’s what I represent; trial and error.

Light is the greatest disinfectant in nature and also in organizations.

Slave to no sect, who takes no private road, But looks through Nature up to Nature’s God.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today – and in fact we have forgotten.

Every natural object is a conductor of divinity and only by coming into contact with them… may we be filled with the Holy Ghost.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue.

The pagan loves the earth in order to enjoy it and confine himself within it; the Christian in order to make it purer and draw from it the strength to escape from it.

Mentally, the only players who survive in the pros are the ones able to manage all their responsibilities. Everybody struggles in different ways.

A women who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.

There are a lot of ‚chicken Christians.‘ Chickens are generally afraid of life, and they seldom fly or reach their potential in life. And when a storm comes, all they seem to do is flap around the chicken yard, stirring up dirt and running to the chicken house.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that’s stripped down.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Strength and growth come only through continuous effort and struggle.

Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal.

Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur. The magnitudes of the rocks and trees and streams are so delicately harmonized, they are mostly hidden.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.