Luke Shaw > Luke's Quotes

“The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
― John Muir

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“I'm the one that's got to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.”
― Jimi Hendrix, The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold as Love | Guitar TAB Sheet Music Collection | Note-for-Note Transcriptions for Electric Guitar Players | Classic Psychedelic Rock Solos

“But better to get hurt by the truth than comforted with a lie.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”
― Alain de Botton

“Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
― 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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Sorry is the fool who trades his soul for a corvette Thinks he'll get the girl he'll only get the mechanic.”
― Eddie Vedder

“When you judge others, you do not define them, you define yourself”
― Earl Nightingale

“Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your mind.”
― Earl Nightingale

“We are all self-made, but only the successful will admit it.”
― Earl Nightingale

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone, and so they don't find themselves at all.”
― Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
― Aristotle

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll , Alice in Wonderland

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous