Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.
Interpretation
This quote suggests a duality in the nature of those who seek high places, balancing self-admiration and a desire for escape.
Robert Macfarlane's quote explores the complex motivations behind why people seek out high places, such as mountain-tops. It implies that while travelers are often drawn to the majesty and beauty of these locations, there is an inherent self-love in their pursuit, as well as a desire to escape the mundane or to detach from reality, represented by 'oblivion'. This dual attraction reflects the intertwined relationship between self-reflection and the quest for deeper truths found in nature.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-discovery and exploration.
As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker's feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream.
All travelers to wild places will have felt some version of this, a brief blazing perception of the world's disinterest. In small measures it exhilarates. But in full form it annihilates.
The more we come out and do good to others, the more our hearts will be purified, and God will be in them.
I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.
GNP measures neither our courage, our wisdom neither our compassion. It measures everything except what makes life worthwhile
And you receivers - and you are all receivers - assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives. Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings; For to be overmindful of your debt, is to doubt his generosity who has the free hearted earth for mother, and God for father.
A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
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