It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I figured out that my main obsession is freedom, and if I didn’t have the freedom of close access to the natural world, I wasn’t going to survive.
— Jim Harrison
When the wine is bitter, become the wine.
— Rilke
On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and the social structure as a whole.
— Frank Zappa
The Mississippi delta
Was shining like a national guitar
— Paul Simon - Graceland
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
— Ambrose Redmoon