Phil Cousineau > Quotes

“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”
― Phil Cousineau

“Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.”
― Phil Cousineau

“Centuries of travel yore suggest that when we no longer know where to turn, our real journey has just begun.”
― Phil Cousineau

“Uncover what you long for and you will discover who you are.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“On an ordinary journey, one designed for sheer entertainment, diversion, or self-reward for a year of hard work, there would be no obvious need to go out of your way to strike up a conversation with a perfect stranger.
But a pilgrimage asks us to do exactly that. The path needs more light. To shine the light of your own natural curiosity into the world of another traveler can reveal wonders. To remember the mysteries you forgot at home.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: A Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“The time has come to set out for sacred ground...that will stir our sense of wonder. It is down the path to the deeply real where time stops and we are seized by the mysteries. This is the journey that we cannot Not take.

The old hermit along the side of the road whispers, Stranger, Pass bythat which you donot love.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“Groucho Marx said, “I find television very educational. Every time someone turns on a set I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“Yet the Lord pleads with you still: Ask where the good road is, the godly paths you used to walk in, in the days of long ago. Travel there, and you will find rest for your souls. —Jeremiah 6:16”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“My love of publishing goes back to my first job on the hometown newspaper when I was a 16-year-old cub reporter, but I caught a novel version of the word and the idea at a 1980 poetry reading by Allan Ginsberg. That night he exhorted all in the audience to remember the original sense of the word when he said that every public reading of a poem was a bona fide form of publishing, taking the good word to the people. For the last word on getting published let’s turn to one of the least recognized, in her own time, of all great writers, Emily Dickinson, who said, “Publication—is the auction of the Mind of Man.” Of her 1775 poems, only seven were published in her lifetime, which flies in the face of the academic exhortation to “publish or perish.” Dickinson rarely published, but her poetry is imperishable.”
― Phil Cousineau, Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words

“There is another call, the one that arrives the day when what once worked no longer does. Sometimes people need a shock; sometimes a tocsin call. It is time for a wake-up call. A man is fired from a job; a child runs away from home; ulcers overtake the body. The ancients called this “soul loss.” Today, the equivalent is the loss of meaning or purpose in our lives. There is a void where there should be what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “juice and joy.” The heart grows cold; life loses its vitality. Our accomplishments seem meaningless. As Tolstoy wrote in his Confessions, “Nothing ahead except ruins.” We seem to be in the thick of the forest without a road. “What, then, must we do?” The long line of myths, legends, poetry, and stories throughout the world tell us that it is at that moment of darkness that the call comes. It arrives in various forms—an itch, a fever, an offer, a ringing, an inspiration, an idea, a voice, words in a book that seem to have been written just for us—or a knock. THE KNOCK The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away. I'm looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling. —Robert Pirsig”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“For a journey without challenge, has no meaning; one without purpose, has no soul.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“One of the ancient functions of pilgrimage is to wake us from our slumber.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“Voltaire playfully wrote, “Ice-cream is exquisite—what a pity it isn’t illegal.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“Nineteenth-century French poet Théophile Gautier illustrates this in his storied travels through Andalusia, recounted in Wanderings in Spain: Traveling becomes a reality, an action in which you take a part. In a diligence {coach} a man is no longer a man, he is but an inert object, a bale of goods, does not much differ from a portmanteau. He is thrown from one place to the other, and might as well stop at home. The pleasure of traveling consists in the obstacles, the fatigue, and even the danger. What charm can any one find in an excursion, when he is always sure of reaching his destination, of having horses ready waiting for him, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the ease and comfort which he can enjoy in his own home! One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the want of any sudden surprise, and the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well arranged, so admirably combined, so plainly labeled, that chance is an utter impossibility; if we go on progressing, in this fashion, towards perfection for another century, every man will be able to foresee everything that will happen to him from the day of his birth to the day of his death. Humanity will be completely annihilated. There will be no more crimes, no more virtues, no more characters, no more originality. It will be impossible to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinese, or a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognize one another, for every one will be alike. An intense feeling of ennui will then take possession of the universe…. What is remarkable about this passage is Gautier's foresight into the plight of too many modern travelers: the washing out of cultural differences among nationalities, the overarching ennui of trendy cynicism, the lack of pleasure in a journey with no surprises. His remarks are a model for those trying to find a way to allow for synchronicity in their travels.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“For instance, if we gaze deeply at the deceptively simple word opportunity, we have a chance to see hidden beauty shining from below, which is the Roman god Portunus, patron of harbors. Seen in this light every new circumstance is like sailing into a strange and distant port, which may offer a haven, if we choose to take refuge.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“David W. Orr writes, in The Nature of Design, “We are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.”
― Phil Cousineau, Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words

“Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest,”
― Phil Cousineau, Wordcatcher: An Odyssey into the World of Weird and Wonderful Words

“When life has lost its meaning, a pilgrim will risk everything to get back in touch with life. This is why relics, such as a tooth of the Buddha, the dried blood of Christ, or a Shakespeare folio, are objects that must be touched as an integral part of the pilgrimage. This is what the risk is for, the confirmation that the mystery exists at all in a modern world seemingly determined to undermine the sacred as mere superstition.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“The wandering French essayist Jacques Reda reminds himself before he leaves his Paris apartment every Sunday morning for his long strolls around the city to see one new thing. . . . he has learned to notice what others ignore.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“In Joseph Campbell's popular book of essays Myths to Live By, he described something pertinent to our theme of sacred journeys: “The ultimate aim of the quest, if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“derives from the 14th-century word Old French aleurer, to attract, captivate, and more exotically, to train a falcon to hunt. The roots are à, to, and loirre, falconer’s lure.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“Leo Tolstoy was fond of an old eastern fable that describes the mysterious way that even tragedy lures us back to life. His story is about a traveler on the steppes who was surprised by a rampaging tiger. The traveler ran for his life, but the beast was gaining on him, so he leapt into a dried-up well, which roused a dragon that had been sleeping on the bottom. As the traveler fell, he was alert enough to grab on to a single, slim branch growing between the cracks of the bricks in the well. There he clung for his life—above him the tiger roaring, below him the dragon snapping its jaws. The traveler's arms grew tired, and he knew it was only a matter of time before the tiger swiped at him from above or he fell to his death. Stubbornly, he held on. The moment he began to hope for a way out, he noticed two mice, one black, one white, gnawing away at either side of the tender branch he clung to. His time was almost up. Surely, he would die soon. Then a glint of sunlight fell on the wall of the well. The traveler's eyes widened. There on the leaves of the bush were drops of honey. He felt a rush of happiness and with the few moments he had left, he calmly stretched out his tongue and tasted the precious honey. Imagine the time you have spent working your way through the labyrinth of your travels. What was chasing you? What stares up at you from below? Are there no drops of honey on the leaves right before your eyes?”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“What legendary travelers have taught us since Pausanius and Marco Polo is that the art of travel is the art of seeing what is sacred.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“On the flip side is Woody Allen’s nebbish observation: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Companion words include mischief and bonchief, a bad result and a good result, respectively,”
― Phil Cousineau, The Painted Word: A Treasure Chest of Remarkable Words and Their Origins

“Sitting there, sweating profusely in the jungle heat, monks to the left and monks to the right, I thought of that beautiful line by Albert Camus, who wrote that a man's life is nothing more than the rediscovery, through the detours of art, of those one or two images that first opened his heart.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“Do the roads around your home seem altered, the food taste different, your everyday thoughts influenced by what you encountered on your pilgrimage? Much may seem changed, but the challenge now is to use the insights gathered on the road to see your everyday life as a pilgrimage. In ways like these, as Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “The path around our home is also the ground of awakening.” Remember again and again that the true pilgrimage is into the undiscovered land of your own imagination, which you could not have explored any other way than through these lands, with gratitude in your satchel and the compassion for all you see as your touchstone.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“Recall the words of Alan Jones, dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who writes, “We are impoverished in our longing and devoid of imagination when it comes to our reaching out to others.…We need to be introduced to our longings, because they guard our mystery.” Ask yourself what mystery is being guarded by your longing. Are you taking the time to find out? The time for this never appears; it is discovered.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

“In other words, if the journey you have chosen is indeed a pilgrimage, a soulful journey, it will be rigorous. Ancient wisdom suggests if you aren't trembling as you approach the sacred, it isn't the real thing. The sacred, in its various guises as holy ground, art, or knowledge, evokes emotion and commotion.”
― Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage: A Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred