Ben > Ben's Quotes

“Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen.”
― A.A. Milne

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
― John Muir

“I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

“And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul”
― John Muir

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Adventures are never fun while you're having them.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

“And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
― Charles Dickens

“Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
― Henry Miller

“To travel is to live.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”
― John Muir, Our National Parks

“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“Today is your day, your mountain is waiting. So get on your way.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.”
― Robert Barron