On Trails Quotes

“We are born to wander through a chaos field. And yet we do not become hopelessly lost, because each walker who comes before us leaves behind a trace for us to follow.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“We move through this world on paths laid down long before we are born.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Complete freedom is not what a trail offers. Quite the opposite; a trail is a tactful reduction of options.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“In walking, we acquire more of less.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“From trains to automobiles to airplanes, each time the speed of connection quickens, travelers have expressed a sense of growing alienation from the land blurring past our windows. In the same vein, many people currently worry that digital technology is making us less connected to the people and things in our immediate environment.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“There are, it is often said by the more ecumenical prophets, many paths up the mountain. So long as it helps a person navigate the world and seek out what is good, a path, by definition, has value.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“A shortcut is a kind of geographic graffiti, pointing out the authoritarian failure to predict our needs and police our desires.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“What unites the wisest trails, I have found, is a balance of three values: durability, efficiency, and flexibility. If a trail has only one of these qualities it will not persist for long: a trail that is too durable will be too fixed, and will fail when conditions change; a trail that is too flexible will be too flimsy, and will erode; and a trail that is too efficient will be too parsimonious, and so will lack resilience.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.” This is the most succinct definition of the wilderness I have found: the not-self. There, in the one place we have not remolded in our image, a very deep and ancient form of wisdom can be found. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote Albert Camus.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“The essence of herding is not domination, but dance.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Everything has to be framed in personal language. The more educated people are about their roots, the more connected they’re going to feel to their land. And then they’re going to stand up and fight for their land.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“In this techscape, new values also emerge—often made up of old words with new connotations: automatic, digital, mobile, wireless, frictionless, smart—and new technology adapts to those values. The current meaning of the word wilderness, one could argue, emerged directly from the techscape of industrialism, just as the current meaning of the word network emerged from the world of telecommunications. With the advent of industrial technology we began to see wilderness less as a landscape devoid of agriculture and more as a landscape free from technology—and thus the wild went from being a wasteland to a refuge.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“To believe that you have the solution for another person is a form of stupidity.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“I often felt this way on the trail: I was able to hold both one notion and its direct opposite in my mind at the same time. Paths, in their very structure, foster this way of thinking. They blear the divide between wilderness and civilization, leaders and followers, self and other, old and new, natural and artificial.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“It is pleasant to be free,” wrote Aldous Huxley, who, like Eberhart, for years owned little more than an automobile and a few books. “But occasionally, I must confess, I regret the chains with which I have not loaded myself. In these moods I desire a house full of stuff, a plot of land with things growing on it; I feel that I should like to know one small place and its people intimately, that I should like to have known them for years, all my life. But one cannot be two incompatible things at the same time. If one desires freedom, one must sacrifice the advantages of being bound.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“On wild land, wild thoughts can flourish. There, we can feel all the ragged edges of what we do not know, and we make room for other living things to live differently.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“The ontological truth—the deep reality of the world—is chaos. But the pragmatic truth—the truth we can actually use, the truth that leads us somewhere—is chaos refined. The former is a wilderness, the latter is a path. Both are essential; both are true.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“As a species, humans straddle a line between external and internal intelligence. With big brains and (typically) small clan size, humans have traditionally harnessed individual cleverness to outcompete rivals for food and mates, to hunt and dominate other species, and, eventually, to seize control of the planet. As later chapters will show, we have also externalized our wisdom in the form of trails, oral storytelling, written texts, art, maps, and much more recently, electronic data. Nevertheless, even in the Internet era, we still romanticize the lone genius. Most of us—especially us Americans—like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get "back to the land,”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Wisdom is a rarified form of intelligence born of experience, the result of carefully testing your beliefs against reality.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“I was discovering that this process works both ways: a journey is never simply the act of gaining a new perspective, but also the experience of being newly seen.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“In the English language it’s I think this, I think that; I want this, I want that. It’s as if we’re in the center of the world and the world is around us,” Belt said. “In our language, everything is here and we’re some place around it. Which means that we’re just a part of it, as opposed to being in the center of it.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Huxley believed that knowledge, even when
empirically proven, is only ever a map, never a view of the territory itself. But perhaps it is not so stark as that: perhaps knowledge is more like a trail—a hybrid of map and territory, artifice and nature—wending through a vast landscape. While science may provide a more reliable route to certain answers than, say, a creation myth, it remains narrow; it can reduce the environment to a navigable line, but it cannot encompass it.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“In a sense, memory can serve as a trail guide—not necessarily a full record of where things are, but an index of how to quickly access them.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Wise designers sculpt with desire, not against it. Previously, when I found an unmarked”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“Smith wrote that the object of skillful herding is not to bully the sheep, but rather to “create a desire with the sheep to do the things that the herder wants them to do,” which, he added, “is the secret of successful handling of all animals.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration

“As the architect Neil Leach has noted, “The city modifies its occupants, no less than the occupants modify the city.”
― Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration