One no longer searches for any ulterior significance in all this; as in the finest music, the meaning is in the music itself, not in anything beyond … - Edward Abbey

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

I've got a crooked elbow and I generally say my prayers with one leg on a brass rail.

Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit. Romance — but not to be dismissed on that account. The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth. But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us — if only we were worthy of it.

To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head: if he ducks he’s a liar. His logic may be airtight but his argument, far from revealing the delusions of living experience, only exposes the limitations of logic.