Michaela > Michaela's Quotes

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.”
― Bob Marley

“This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog.'

Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“The world suffers a lot. Not because the violence of bad people. But because of the silence of the good people.”
― Napoleon

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“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. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”
― Aldo Leopold

“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?”
― Aldo Leopold

“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Thinking like a Mountain
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. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“Dolphins and sharks are natural enemies. Dolphins are like, "Quit eating us," and sharks are like, "Stop smiling all the time, you morons.”
― Dan Florence, Zombies Love Pizza

“Passion is passion. It's the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn't matter where it's directed...It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith...the saddest people I've ever met in life are the ones who don't care deeply about anything at all.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Dear John

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”
― Adlai E. Stevenson

“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.”
― Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“I guess that’s all forever is...Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Sometimes what seems like surrender isn't surrender at all. It's about what's going on in our hearts. About seeing clearly the way life is and accepting it and being true to it, whatever the pain, because the pain of not being true to it is far, far greater. ”
― Nicholas Evans

“It was in America that horses first roamed. A million years before the birth of man, they grazed the vast plains of wiry grass and crossed to other continents over bridges of rock soon severed by retreating ice. They first knew man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he saw them as a means to killing other beasts, man killed them for their meat.

Paintings on the walls of caves showed how. Lions and bears would turn and fight and that was the moment men speared them. But the horse was a creature of flight not fight and, with a simple deadly logic, the hunter used flight to destroy it. Whole herds were driven hurtling headlong to their deaths from the tops of cliffs. Deposits of their broken bones bore testimony. And though later he came pretending friendship, the alliance with man would ever be but fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged.

Since that neolithic moment when first a horse was haltered, there were those among men who understood this.

They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. Often they were seen as witches and perhaps they were. Some wrought their magic with the bleached bones of toads, plucked from moonlit streams. Others, it was said, could with but a glance root the hooves of a working team to the earth they plowed. There were gypsies and showmen, shamans and charlatans. And those who truly had the gift were wont to guard it wisely, for it was said that he who drove the devil out, might also drive him in. The owner of a horse you calmed might shake your hand then dance around the flames while they burned you in the village square.

For secrets uttered softly into pricked and troubles ears, these men were known as Whisperers.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“It's a lot like nuts and bolts - if the rider's nuts, the horse bolts! ”
― Nicholas Evans

“I absolutely think that happiness is a choice. One of the most potent forces in human psychology is the power of habit. Do something, think something, often enough and it will become the only thing you can do or think. Choose to be unhappy and soon that’s all you will be. Live in a swamp and you’ll grow webbed feet.”
― Nicholas Evans

“No man may earn his heart's desire, lest first he brave the smoke and fire”
― Nicholas Evans, The Smoke Jumper

“Annie looked into his eyes with their blood-crazed whites and for the first time in her life knew how one might come to believe in the devil.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer

“Knowing is the easy part; saying it out loud is the hard part.”
― nicholas evans, The Horse Whisperer

“But you see Annie, where there's pain, there's still feeling and where there's feeling, there's hope.”
― Nicholas Evans, The Horse Whisperer