Tell Us Your Favorite Outdoor Quote, Win Free Gossamer Gear Stuff!
UPDATE: The winner is Killerbee938. Congratulations! Please email me with your address so we can ship your swag. The contest is now closed.
The lucky winner of this contest will receive a nice little package from Gossamer Gear including:
1. One Thinlight 3/8" sleeping pad
2. One Medium Polycryo Ground Cloth
3. One Lighten Up DVD
RULES: Winner will be chosen at random Friday, March 11th 2011 at 6:00 PM MST. To be entered in the contest, all you have to do is reply to this post (no emails please) with your favorite quote about the outdoors. Good luck and I look forward to hearing your quotes!
The lucky winner of this contest will receive a nice little package from Gossamer Gear including:
1. One Thinlight 3/8" sleeping pad
2. One Medium Polycryo Ground Cloth
3. One Lighten Up DVD
RULES: Winner will be chosen at random Friday, March 11th 2011 at 6:00 PM MST. To be entered in the contest, all you have to do is reply to this post (no emails please) with your favorite quote about the outdoors. Good luck and I look forward to hearing your quotes!
Tell Us Your Favorite Outdoor Quote, Win Free Gossamer Gear Stuff!
Reviewed by Jason Klass
on
March 09, 2011
Rating:

138 comments
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
.John Muir
Be conservative or be lucky, O ye hikers! Nature bats last.
-Adonis Tate
Just Keep Walking...
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit. - Edward Abbey
"To awake in the freshness of morning and know that one is part of the rising sun, the orange-tinted fog, the vibrant earth, the
magnificence of growth, is to discover an affinity that comes closer to life's fulfillment than any other..."
Calvin Rutstrum, 1895-1982
"Tread softly on the stones, so as not to hurt them!"
Confucius?
Take a compass because eating your friend is just creepy.
"The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask."
— Nancy Newhall
"It's always flat along the ridgeline!" - Sarah "Sarbar" Kirkconnell :)
Here's mine: "Knowledge is the key to survival and the best thing about that is; it doesn't weigh anything." - Ray Mears
Knowledge is the ultimate piece of ultralight gear - kinda cool.
"This is why I recommend walking so passionately. It is an altogether positive and delectable addiction. Naturally, not everyone understands."
--Colin Fletcher
There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.--Steven Wright
"Oh Shit! I stepped in human shit!" -- Brian Craig, while backpacking Pikes Peak last summer.
"Get out and hike. Take a friend. Enjoy a great meal. But more than anything: Have a really great day. Bye-bye" -Tinny
Take only Pictures, Leave only Footprints
It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent. ~Dave Barry
"If a tree falls in the forest and no ones around, does it really make a sound?" I say let's go find out...
"Sometimes you have to get lost to find yourself."
"Sometimes you have to get lost to find yourself."
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken," 1916
"I don't see how anybody could have a passion for nature without having an equally developed tolerance for the cold."
-Tom Brown Jr.(The Tracker)
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion." Henry David Thoreau from Walden
Every trip when I get up I think of John Muir's quote:
"How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains."
I got into an argument with a girlfriend inside of a tent. That's a bad place for an argument, because then I tried to walk out and slammed the flap. How are you supposed to express your anger in this situation? Zipper it up really quick?
-Mitch Hedberg
“A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.”
-Paul Dudley White
Just keep swimming...
"Yo Rondeau!"
(Polish phrase said after every hike meaning "nice driveway" regarding the path just taken).
This is a very old reference apparently and while I am not Polish, I think it is a great way to celebrate a hike.
Walking takes longer... than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. ~Edward Abbey
The mountains are calling and I must go.
- John Muir
"That aught to keep a leopard or two away from me."
Les Stroud
Don't eat the yellow snow.
The more you know, the less you need to carry.
“A week of camp life is worth six months of theoretical teaching in the meeting room.” Sir Robert Baden Powell
"If a man talks in the forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
I know you asked for quotes and there are many, but how about an outdoor poem?
Trees - Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
“In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” John Muir
Nobody ever cries in a Hammock
It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.
-Dave Barry
"Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory."
This is the quote I live by. I really messed up my body a few summers ago by pushing too hard and too fast, ignoring what my body was saying in order to get to the top. Now, I make sure that if I get to the top, I'll still have enough steam to get back down without any lasting injuries.
Rock. In. Shoe. Hurts! -- George
"While in the forest, shoot nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time, leave nothing but footprints and bring home nothing but memories." - I thought it was from lnt.org, but now I googled it and found it here - http://artibaldo.tripod.com/arts/
You're gonna need a bigger boat. Brody
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
I travel for travel's sake.
The great affair is to move."
-Robert Loius Stevenson
"Carry as little as possible, but choose that little with care" Earl Shaffer, first thru-hiker to complete the AT.
Mike Box
"Not all those who wander are lost ..."
Out of context perhaps, but it works on so many levels. ;-)
"Sometimes at night when I hear the wind blowing, I wish I was crazy again."
--Johnny Cash
"The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer."
- Fridtjof Nansen
Adaptable to all walks of life. =)
“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
JRR Tolkien
"Use what talents you possess; The woods would be very silent if
no birds sang there except those that sang best."
-- William Blake
"Life has no meaning. There is nothing called meaning in nature. Meaning is a purely human concept which we put into existence." Fridtjof Nansen.
That quote always warms my heart and reassure me when I've overreached and put myself in some dangerous situation, "well so what if I die, it all means nothing anyway".
I'll bite. This is my forum signature:
Without a doubt, the hardest thing of all in a survival situation is to cook without the benefit of seasonings and flavourings. - Ray Mears
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods; There is a rapture on the lonely shore; There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not man the less, but Nature more...- Lord Byron
There's no such thing as bad weather; only improper equipment.
The point is though, that after too much of either end of the spectrum, I miss the other, and too much of the middle makes me miss both ends. --- Chris Hallaxs
"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness." - John Muir
"We abuse land when we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
Aldo Leopold
“Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.”
E. F. Schumacher
"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds."
- Edward Abbey
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
-Bilbo Baggins, Lord of the Rings
Here is a couple quotes from Dick Proenneke. The first one is about making his log cabin:
“I don’t want these logs lookin like a boyscout was turned loose on them with a dull hatchet”
“This lake is kinda like a woman, all smiles one minute, and dancin’ a temper tantrum the next!”
-Brian
“Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.” Mark Twain
“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things” - Robert A. Heinlein
If you're not living on the edge, then you're taking up too much room.
"“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” - John Muir
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." -Henry David Thoreau, in Walden
"The summit is just around the bend"
"The mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambitions to achieve. They are my cathedrals, the houses of my religion." - Anatoli Boukreev
"My particular dread--the vivid possibility that left me staring at tree shadows on the bedroom ceiling night after night--was having to lie in a small tent, alone in an inky wilderness, listening to a foraging bear outside and wondering what its intentions were."
--Bill Bryson "A Walk in the Woods"
"There are three kinds of pipe. There's aluminum, which is garbage. There's bronze, which is pretty good, unless something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. Then, there's copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves money."
Cosmo Castorini, Moonstruck
(aka, "why Gossamer, and not a cheaper knockoff")
"there's a heaven on earth that so few ever find" - Dan Folgelberg
The Mountains are calling-And I must go.. John Muir
"Leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."
- Theodore Roosevelt - at the Grand Canyon
"Most people today are pantywaist"
- Emma Rowena "Grandma" Gatewood
"Ounces equal pounds. Pounds equal pain."
- Unattributed
"We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching
of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature." Henry David Thoreau
+1 on the quote from Tinny, "Get out and hike. Take a friend. Enjoy a great meal. But more than anything: Have a really great day. Bye-bye" -Tinny"
He was my first real introduction to UL gear and information. But the following is on my hiking staff from scripture sticks:
Isaiah 40:31 (KJV) But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.
-Stephen
"A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty."-Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes,
You want to wear the least you can, and still not get frost-bitten.’
It is not the destination, but the journey!
I'm fading like a Kmart beach towel.-Gene Thibeault
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains? Nature remains.-Walt Whitman
I am sorry that is over.
"The thing to remeber when traveling is that the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all that you are traveling for."
-Louis L'Amour
"There is an intense but simple thrill in setting off in the morning on a mountain trail, knowing that everything you need is on your back. It is a confidence in having left the inessentials behind and of entering a world of natural beauty that has not been violated, where money has no value, and possessions are a dead weight. The person with the fewest possessions is the freest."
Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania.
"The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun!" - Alex Lowe
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men." -Henry David Thoreau
"Life is a trail, not a camp."
...Source unknown
"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home."
— Gary Snyder
Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So get on your way. Dr. Seuss
"Some people hear the song in the quiet mist of a cold morning..... But for other people the song is loudest in the evening when they are sitting in front of a tent, basking in the camp fire's warmth. This is when I hear it loudest ...." Bill Mason
Doug Hus
The trees don't care what you look like.
When you have no horse, you ride your donkey
When you have no donkey, you ride a goat
When you have no goat, you ride your legs
-Creole Saying
Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved. Bill Bradley
"Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face."
Dave Barry
there's always the unexpected.
Being warm and dry is over rated.
- Tom Halvachek
'The great outdoors: it's great and it's outdoors... and it's YOURS'
Father Ted (but I think I added the last bit...)
It has got to be:
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness - John Muir
Thanks Ben
A weird, lovely, fantastic object out of nature like Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us – like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness – that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship. The shock of the real. For a little while we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels. For a few moments we discover that nothing can be taken for granted, for if this ring of stone is marvelous then all which shaped it is marvelous, and our journey here on earth, able to see and touch and hear in the midst of tangible and mysterious things-in-themselves, is the most strange and daring of all adventures.
-Edward Abbey
...take nothing but memories and pictures, leave nothing but footprints, and kill only time... (Bette Filley in Discovering the Wonders of the Wonderland Trail)
"We do not go into the woods to rough it; we go to smooth it--we get it rough enough in town. But let us live the simple, natural life in the woods, and leave all frills behind."
~Nessmuk, quoted from Horace Kephart's Camping and Woodcraft
'No matter where you go,
There you are.'
-Buckaroo Banzai
"Hike your own hike."
Said by almost everyone I met on the AT. This simple phrase meant a lot to me on the trail. It is important to achieve your goals on the trail and in life. Don't focus on the priorities of others.
"THE WILL TO LIVE MEANS NEVER GIVING IN, REGARDLESS OF SITUATION."
-JOHN "LOFTY" WISEMAN
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.
There was never yet such a storm
but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Here I am, safely returned
over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange
than anything I had hoped for or imagined
--how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
-Peter Matthiessen
"The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
Esdras
"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountain." -Aldo Leopold
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."
Frodo
If you want to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, just follow the white blazes and don't stop til you get to Maine!
Adventure is just bad planning.
-- Roald Amundsen
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity..."
— John Muir
"There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler’s fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby’s hand."
Bill Bryson - A walk in the Woods
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost
"They don't call it The Great Indoors!"
"Not all who wander are lost;"
"Little by little, one travels far"
"I wisely started with a map."
JRR Tolkien
“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.”
--Henry David Thoreau
"you see that mountain over there yea one day I'm gonna climb that mountain"
Alabama (intro to mountain music)
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.
John Muir
"Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object."
--Henry Fuseli
"Besides, the point of wilderness is not so much to get lost as it is to lose yourself, to be immersed in the ecology of Genesis, the world before the fall."
--Frank Clifford
The Backbone of the World
"How can you explain that you need to know that the trees are still there, and the hills and the sky? Anyone knows they are. How can you say it is time your pulse responded to another rhythm, the rhythm of the day and the season instead of the hour and the minute? No, you cannot explain. So you walk." - Anon
The outdoors, the beautiful environment, both in fresh and salt water. And the thing that concerns me is the amount of kids that stand on street corners, or go into pinball parlours, and call it recreation.
Rex Hunt
"I hate white rabbits"
"I hate white rabbits"
"I only want that I can be used to better your life, and the life of others, and that one day, my legacy will be one of service because I had the time to serve you, instead of the felt need to worry about my own complicated little world." Ryan Jordan on The Futility of Going Ultralight for Ultralight's Sake
"Plants grow by the inch but die by the foot..."
Lets see what Ive left behind this time ?
Congrats John! What was the winning quote? I didn't find it in the comments.
John Wiseman (SAS Survival Handbook) is the guy who is being quoted, it was "Killerbee938" that made the comment.
Paul & Jose,
DOH! Thanks for pointing that out. I've corrected it. Hopefully Killerbee9238 will see it. If anyone know him, please let him know.
Killerbee938 won the contest but hasn't contacted me about where to ship the prize. Does anyone know them or have their contact info? I will need to pick a new winner if they don't respond.
Keep your load and your spirits... light.
'Tis better to marvel at God's creation than at man-made things.
-John Shannon
Remember, there is no such thing as fun for the entire family.
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior.
-Walt Whitman
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"Then said he unto them,
But now, he that hath a purse (money bag),
let him take it, and likewise his scrip (shepherd's bag),
and he that hath no sword,
let him sell his garnet and buy one."
-Jesus of Nazareth (Luke 22:36)
Your blog update us all awareness of trekking.
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