Quote For The Day

A regularly featured item in our email newsletter is the "Quote For The Day." We have compiled them all here, along with the dates we featured them.

June 24, 2009 "In the long run, nothing's more important than the evolution of consciousness. Winning championships is the greatest feeling in the world, but it passes. In even the best-case scenario, it is just a by-product. What doesn't pass is the opportunity it offers each individual player for personal growth and evolving consciousness."

- Phil Jackson, "More Than a Game," 10 time NBA championship coach
June 15, 2009 "A lot of people want a shortcut. I find the best shortcut is the long way, which is basically two words: work hard. As I see it, if you work more hours than somebody else, during those hours you learn more about your craft. That can make you more efficient, more able, even happier. Hard work is like compounded interest in the bank. The rewards build faster."

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
June 9, 2009 "Bear in mind that the wonderful things you learn in your schools are the work of many generations. All this is put in your hands as your inheritance in order that you may receive it, honor it, add to it, and one day faithfully hand it on to your children."

- Albert Einstein
June 1, 2009 "The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people."

- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
May 29, 2009 "The world belongs to the energetic."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson
May 15, 2009 “A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

- Albert Camus
May 10, 2009 "Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point."

- Harold B. Melchart
May 4, 2009 "One of the interesting lessons I've learned from running extreme distances is that the more you can rely on the natural scenery around you for company - the mountains, the desert, your crew, the other runners - rather than distracting yourself from what you're doing by feeding artificial noise into your ears, the better. Instead of listening to someone else's disembodied, digitized voice, you make yourself listen to your own thoughts and reactions to what you see, and you pay attention to the other people who are with you in the present moment." -

- Frank McKinney, three-time Badwater Ultramarathon finisher, author
April 29, 2009 "When I first caught sight of (Mount Shasta) over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since."

- John Muir

April 27, 2009 "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

- John Muir

April 13, 2009 "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."

- Anais Nin
April 8, 2009 "When you dance, your purpose is not to get to a certain place on the floor. It's to enjoy each step along the way."

- Wayne Dyer
March 31, 2009 "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."

- Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Albert Schweitzer
March 17, 2009 "Practice just being nobody and going nowhere."

- Elizabeth Jefferson
March 11, 2009 "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

- Steve Jobs
March 7, 2009 "There are occasionally people in your life with whom you have an innate sense of communication. I've found that these people are often your training partners. Perhaps it's due to the countless hours spent together not always being able to communicate verbally. Instead, we consciously and subconsciously study and learn their movements and expressions. Over time words are needed less and less. Rather a subtle gesture or body movement or quick look is all it takes to completely understand each other.

"Back home a couple months after our rookie appearance at the 2008 Furnace Creek 508, my Black Angus Cow teammate Scott and I met for dinner at our favorite local hangout, the Q-Shack. As always, the barbequed brisket was tender and the conversation light, but when a friend brought up the previous year's 508, we both knew what was coming. We had both sensed it since leaving the desert. We had heard it in the still of night and just as clearly during the noisy backdrop of the world during the day. With a quick glance, just like the countless ones during all our rides together, I saw his eyes and knew.

"The desert was calling us back."

- Furnace Creek entrant Keith Wetiz of Team Black Angus Cow
February 2, 2009 "One of my favorite things about cycling is that it can reward suffering with joy. Another thing I love about it is that it often rejects those who don't understand this. Cycling teaches you that there's such a thing as necessary suffering and such a thing as unnecessary suffering, and that sometimes a short cut is a dead end."

- Bike Snob NYC
January 20, 2009 "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 2009 "Would you enjoy a trip to hell? You Might Enjoy a Trip to Death Valley, Now! It has all the advantages of hell without the inconveniences."

- An ad for the Death Valley Chuckwalla magazine on April Fools Day of 1907, as quoted on the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce website
January 6, 2009 "I've always thought that risk-taking is an important part of what it means to be human."

- Donald C. Johanson
December 16, 2008 "I do not know how to instill a taste for adventure in those who have not acquired it, and yet there are those who suddenly tear themselves away from their comfortable existence and, using the energy of their bodies as an example to their brains, apply themselves to the discovery of unexpected pleasures and places."

- Pierre Elliot Trudeau,
Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe; 1944
December 3, 2008 "You are not dead yet. It is not too late
To open your depths by plunging into them
And drink in the life
That reveals itself quietly there."

- Rainer Maria Rilke
November 26, 2008 "It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting right here right now, with its aches and its pleasures, is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive."

- Pema Chodron
November 19, 2008 "We cannot lower the mountain, therefore we must elevate ourselves."

- Todd Skinner
November 17, 2008 "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."

- Lao Tzu
November 14, 2008 "The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep."

- Rumi
October 30, 2008 "Cerca, trova" (Seek and you shall find)

- Giorgio Vasari
October 20, 2008 "What was hard to do is sweet to remember."

- Seneca
October 16, 2008 "No man can live this life (in the desert) and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, and will have within him the yearning to return."

- Sir Wilfred P. Thesinger
October 14, 2008 "Without ambition one starts nothing.
Without work one finishes nothing."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson
September 29, 2008 "Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also."

-Marcus Aurelius
September 26, 2008 "For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one."

- Alfred D'Souza
September 8, 2008 "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

- Edgar Allan Poe, "Eleonora"
August 28, 2008 "When you're stuck sitting in a comfort zone, small problems become magnified. Get out of your comfort zone, touch the edge, and you come back with an appreciation for life."

- Barbara Warren
August 26, 2008

"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

- Chinese Proverb
August 14, 2008 "Nothing's better than the wind to your back, the sun in front of you, and your friends beside you."

- Aaron Douglas Trimble
August 8, 2008 "Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal."

- Elizabeth Aston
July 10, 2008 "Death Valley is desert and mountains laid bare and dissected. This is serious wilderness, 3.4 million acres' worth (the largest patch in the lower 48), and the geography is ferociously rough: from the shimmering, superheated salt pan to the gashed and broken mountain ranges that surround it. Even the name sounds harsh. But trips here don't have to be. If you play it smart and plan your visit right - keeping in mind distances and the inherent challenge of the landscape - you will come away with a lasting taste of America at its most extreme."

- Robert Earle Howells, National Geographic Adventure, June / July 2008
July 7, 2008 "Within the hour I'll land, and strangely enough I'm in no hurry to have it pass. I haven't the slightest desire to sleep. There's not an ache in my body. The night is cool and safe. I want to sit quietly in this cockpit and let the realization of my completed flight sink in... It's like struggling up a mountain after a rare flower, and then, when you have it within arm's reach, realizing that the satisfaction and happiness lie more in the finding than in the having. Plucking the flower and having it whither are inseparable... I almost wish Paris were a few more hours away. It seems a shame to land with the night so clear and so much fuel in my tanks."

- Charles Lindbergh
July 3, 2008 "Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder, the coldness increases, responsibility increases."

- Friedrich Nietzsche
June 26, 2008 "And if you should survive to 105
Look at all you'll derive out of being alive.
Then here is the best part
You have a head start
If you are among the very young at heart."

- Frank Sinatra
June 18, 2008

“My bike is my wheelchair, my gym and my church, all in one”

- Bill Walton
June 2, 2008 "In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

- Charles Lindbergh
May 28, 2008 "I would advise all youths aspiring to athletic fame or a professional career to practice clean living, fair play and good sportsmanship."

- Marshall "Major" Taylor
May 8, 2008 "The four of us were once world-class wanderers, equipped with weeks to spare but little cash; now that we're all professionals, with less time and more money, we try to pack our outings into small, highly structured slots. One day I realized that we spend more days plotting our trips than taking them, and it made me think that we'd lost our adventurous edge, that we were no longer willing to do something that amounts to nothing."

- Steven Rinella
April 21, 2008 "Don't you dare waste a minute!"

- Sandy Sanders, in reference to life
April 17, 2008 "If you think you're going nowhere and you stop, then you're not going nowhere anymore."

- Harrison Ford
April 8, 2008 "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."

- Kingsley Amis

April 3, 2008 "Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation."

- Eugene V. Debs
Mar 12, 2008 "Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mar 10, 2008 "There is only one perfect road and that road is ahead of you, always ahead of you."

- Sri Chinmoy
Feb 24, 2008 "The correlation between what shaman types do and what extreme athletes and adventurers do is obvious: both use risk, exhaustion, and so forth to break through into a more intense, potent state of being."

- Rob Schultheis
Feb 5, 2008 "Only boring people get bored."

- Shelby Kostman
Jan 16, 2008 "You can't get fit in one workout, just as you can't live your life in one day."

- Johnny G
Jan 7, 2008 "In general, mankind, since the improvement of cookery, eats twice as much as nature requires."

- Benjamin Franklin
Dec 26, 2007 "Do or not to. There is no try."

- Yoda
Dec 18, 2007 "Who is more patriotic, the person who commutes to work on a bike, or the guy who slaps a U.S. flag decal on his SUV that gets twelve miles per gallon?"

- Jim Caple, writing at ESPN.com
Dec 11, 2007 "You have to wonder at times what you're doing out there. Over the years, I've given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement."

- Steve Prefontaine
Dec 6, 2007 "The time before us is history.
The time after, the future.
What lies between those two parallels is our time."

- D3
Nov 15, 2007 "All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer."

- Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince"
Nov 1, 2007 "The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave."

- T.E. Lawrence, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," 1926
Oct 23, 2007 "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

- George Bernard Shaw
Oct 17, 2007 "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Oct 15, 2007

"You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out … and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe." 

- Edward Abbey
Oct 1, 2007 "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

- Friedrich Nietzsche
Sept 28, 2007 "But you, by the grace of an ordeal in the night which stripped you of all that was not intrinsic, you discovered a mysterious creature born of yourself. Great was this creature, and never shall you forget him."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "Wind, Sand, and Stars"
Sept 25, 2007 "From the solitary tops of these mountains, the eye gazes around with pleasure, filling the mind with adoration to that pervading spirit that made them."

- Charles Mason, 1767, quoted in "Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America," by Edwin Danson, 2001.
Aug 30, 2007 "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

- Benjamin Franklin
Aug 20, 2007 "I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstance."

- Martha Washington
Aug 10, 2007 "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

- Mark Twain

Jul 21, 2007 "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Jul 17, 2007 "All running, all exercise - all work, for that matter - is a dance with fatigue, manipulation of it, experimentation with it, and finally, acceptance of it."

- John Jerome, 'The Elements of Effort'
Jul 16, 2007 "As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently"

- Meriwether Lewis, 1805
Jul 11, 2007 "Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had sought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence, and where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world."

- Joseph Campbell, 'The Power of Myth'
Jul 5, 2007 "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."

- T.E. Lawrence, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom,' 1926
Jun 28, 2007 "There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. But you can live in terms of that depth."

- Joseph Campbell, 'The Power of Myth'
Jun 12, 2007 "When it is dark enough, men see the stars."

- Ralph Waldo Emmerson
Jun 4, 2007 "Man has always gone where he has been able to go, it is a basic satisfaction of his inquisitive nature, and I think we all lose a little bit if we choose to turn our backs on further exploration."

- Michael Collins, 'Carrying The Fire'
May 21, 2007 "This is an absolute necessity for anybody today: You must have a room, or a certain hour of the day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen."

- Joseph Campbell, 'The Power of Myth'
May 14, 2007 "When you're in the desert, you look into infinity.... It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way, quite big."

- David Lean
May 7, 2007 "Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. And you cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."

- T.S. Eliot
Apr 6, 2007 "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

- César Chávez
Apr 26, 2007 "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Apr 6, 2007 "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."

- T.S. Eliot
Mar 7, 2007 "Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much...in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

- Theodore Roosevelt
Feb 26, 2007 "The best things in life cannot be told. That is to say, you cannot describe that which lies beyond the reach of words."

- From 'A Joseph Campbell Companion, Reflections on the Art of Living'
Feb 16, 2007 "If you try to open a walnut shell when the shell is still green, it is nearly impossible; but if you wait until it is ripe, it opens with a tap."

- Ramakrishna
Feb 1, 2007

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

- T. S. Eliot
Jan 24, 2007 "He saw that to lose everything at the edge of such a glorious eternity is far sweeter than to win by plodding through a cautious, painless, and featureless life."

- Laurence Gonzales, 'Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why'
Jan 15, 2007 "Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, a flame burns in each of us, and our soul seeks union, and we seek meaning, and purpose, and direction. We awaken at our own pace. Ultimately, there is no problem, only a process, and that process is perfect."

- Dan Millman, 1999
Jan 9, 2007 "When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly."

- Barbara J. Winter
Jan 3, 2007 "And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

- Anais Nin
Dec 11, 2006 "Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower. (Lead us not into temptation.)"

- Joseph Campbell
Dec 5, 2006 "People say what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

- Joseph Campbell
Nov 22, 2006 "The urge to do and be that which is the noblest, the most beautiful of which we are capable, is the creative impulse of every high achievement."

- Yogananda
Nov 20, 2006 "To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good. Green grape, ripe cluster, raisin: every step a change, not into what is not, but what is yet to be."

- Marcus Aurelius
Nov 17, 2006 "The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic."

George Orwell
Nov 15, 2006 "If you think you have the physical and mental fortitude to complete this event you owe it to yourself to give it a shot. I can promise you it will be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. This event grabs you in a very deep way. I have a spiritual connection with this event that is very hard to explain. I'm not a touchy feely kind of guy but I left a part of my soul on that race course and I don't think I'll ever be able to completely walk away from this race. It is dangerously painful, but the feeling you get when you roll through that toilet paper finish is worth every ounce of pain you absorbed out on the road."

- Greg Silly Goose Matherly, 2006 Furnace Creek 508 finisher
May 24, 2006 "The greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses; people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you.' Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few friends these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms, she rewards passionately."

- Tim Krabbé, "The Rider"
Mar 10, 2006 "The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others."

- Igjugarjuk, Caribou Eskimo Shaman, quoted in Joseph Campbell's 'The Power of Myth'
Dec 2, 2003 "When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking."

- Arthur Conan Doyle, in an 1896 article for Scientific American