Bernd Heinrich Quotes

In order to forge alliances, we first need worthy adversaries. Without adversaries, no alliances are necessary.

Movement is the essence of life.

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.

Deep down we are all still runners

The newspaper, delivered daily to my mailbox, is a convenience I need to help start my fire in the morning. Not wanting to waste anything, I sometimes even read it.

Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform. As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over.

Give a man the secure possession of bleak rocks," Arthur Young said in Travels in 1787, "and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years of lease of a garden, and he will convert it to a desert ...

There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as running
and nothing quite so savage, so wild.

Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.

I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing - to be sharp, yet open.

Planting nuts requires a vision for a future that goes beyond one's mortal reach. If we envision ourselves as participants in the same grand, complex web of interactions as the forest, then planting acorns is like planting part of ourselves. The morality that comes from such a vision of ecosystem-as-life is a common thread that, if taught and encouraged, could unite all of mankind.

THE FOLLOWING LATE April I found a dead bull moose about two kilometers from the site where I had left the doe. A bull moose probably weighs ten times as much as a white-tailed doe. This one looked emaciated; it had apparently died from complications of moose tick disease, a common

I retained little from the textbooks, learning instead from what I lived and the things I touched that held emotional content for me.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection. - ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, German philosopher

Conditions are seldom ideal, and if one waits long enough for ideal conditions one is just making excuses.

Somewhere there is a check on their natural rate of increase, and you can be sure of one thing - that if they could tell us what they wanted at any one time, they would vote to obliterate the forces that hold them in check, the forces that ensure their long-term benefits. And so, probably, would we, if we voted merely on the basis of our individual interests.

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference ... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation ... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.

By providing safe nesting sites, woodpeckers are thus keystone organisms for a vast assemblage of birds the world over, including many owls, parrots, parids, flycatchers.

I try not to be a sucker to our natural tendency to seek pleasure and satisfaction, which causes us to believe almost anything that makes us feel better and then deem it "right." But I cannot exclude the possibility that there may be other dimensions to the world aside from the familiar ones and that something lives on beyond my physical self. If so, when I pass on, it will be a celebration for some other beginning and not an end. Even if that is not the case, I have lost nothing and gained much.

One of the beautiful things about running is that it is direct and elegant. The formula is simple: put one foot in front of the other. It doesn't take much to figure out that if you want to improve sprint speed, you run faster. If you want to improve distance-running performance, you run farther.