Mountaintops Quotes

I believe in love, but I'm not sitting around waiting for it. I buy houses. I travel. I take jobs on mountaintops in Transylvania ... I know that happiness comes in many ways and if you spend your life hoping to be found by or to find a significant other, you're going to miss out on all that stuff. And that's what makes you special and makes your life rich. ~ Renee Zellweger

Kenneth Tynan once said that the only people who can do Russian drama, outside of the Russians themselves, are the Irish. I presume that's because we are somewhat manic in the mood department. It's no bother to soar from the darkest depths to the mountaintops of delight, with the heart borne by all of that which is alive and singing. It's even less bother to swan-dive into the pits of despair and total hopelessness, with the realization that it's no use being Irish unless you know the world is eventually going to break your heart. ~ Malachy McCourt

I go all the way down to First Avenue ... I realize it's Friday Night all over America, in New York it's just ten o'clock and the fight's started in the Garden and longshoremen in North River bars are all watching the fight and drinking 20 beers apiece, and Sams are sitting in the front row ... while I spent all summer pacing and praying in mountaintops, of rock and snow, of lost birds and bears, these people've been sucking on cigarettes and drinks and pacing and praying in their souls, too, in their own way ... ~ Jack Kerouac

When the elders built this place, it was only bare mountaintops.' I look to the crowd. 'It didn't become a home because they filled it with towers. It became a home because they built it together. This land, these temples--they're not what matters. As long as we have each other, we will carry Orisha in our veins. No one can ever take that away. ~ Tomi Adeyemi

Life is not the mountaintops, it's the walking in between. ~ Ben Rector

Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn't particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn't hold with taking off anymore clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No specters haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.

Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won't do. ~ Terry Pratchett

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery - there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair. ~ Rick Warren

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys, ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Nature, at its strongest, shaved off mountaintops or threw houses into the air, but it couldn't was away pain. Everything had limitations. ~ Courtney C. Stevens

I was not a religious man, but if I were, the woods would be my church, the mountaintops my altar. ~ Tom Ryan

Ricki Jo," Momma says, "who's on the phone? Tell them it's past your bedtime."
I cover the receiver and look over my shoulder at my folks. Right. 'Cause a ten o'clock bedtime is something I want to shout from the mountaintops. ~ Alecia Whitaker

Some men go through life absolutely miserable because, despite the most enormous achievement, they just didn't do one thing-like the architect who didn't build St Paul's. I didn't quite build St Paul's, but I stood on more mountaintops than possibly I deserved. ~ Peter Thorneycroft, Baron Thorneycroft

Mountaintops are for views and inspiration, but fruit is grown in the valleys. ~ Billy Graham

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air.
At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land.
Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home. ~ Patricia McCormick

Striving to save wildlife species and their dwindling habitats is a noble goal. It takes tremendous persistence in the face of those with money and power who want to expedite their short-range goals regardless of impacts on wildlife and habitat. You have moments on the mountaintops of exhilaration, and moments in the desolate valleys of despair. You have days when the goal you have set out to pursue appears absolutely impossible to achieve. But you must persist. ~ Bobbie Holaday

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives.

Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil.

And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own vi ~ Priscilla Stuckey

Is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can't afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence - its "Don't Pick Up Hitchhikers" warning signs, its barbed fences - the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones. ~ Leslie Jamison

I've had injuries in my life from things beyond my control: runaway horses, helicopters that decide to crash on mountaintops, boating accidents - things that were out of my hands. ~ Christie Brinkley

Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers. ~ Marisa De Los Santos

I would like a boyfriend. I'm a very happy person and it is the final, final piece of the puzzle. I'm looking for that shout-it-out-from-the-mountaintops, fall-in-love person. ~ Andy Cohen

B'gwus is famous because of his wide range of homes. In some places, he's called Bigfoot. In other places, he's Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, or Sasquatch. To most people, he is the equivalent of the Loch Ness monster, something silly to bring the tourist in. His image is even used to sell beer, and he is portrayed as a laid-back kind of guy, lounging on mountaintops in patio chairs, cracking open a frosty one. ~ Eden Robinson

He woke up frozen stiff. A cold dawn was lighting up the peaks on the other side of the valley, making them shine like giant lanterns. Above, through the broken bones of the roof, he could see the sky, clear now, a deep violet blue, waiting for the sun to breach the mountaintops. The snow clouds had gone, off to bother someone else. Where he lay was still dark, wrapped in leftover shadows. The wall, so deliciously warm when he'd fallen asleep, was like ice, sucking the heat out of him, but what had woken him were screams. Long piercing screams, over and over. ~ Stephen Deas

When they reached the top of the hill they turned and looked down at the valley. Moominhouse was just a blue dot, and the river a narrow ribbon of green: the swing they couldn't see at all. "We've never been such a long way from home before," said Moomintroll, and a little goose-fleshy thrill of excitement came over them at the thought. ~ Tove Jansson

As artist Nature splashes color across the vast canvas of the sky with
the radiance and splendor of sunrise and sunset.
She arches rainbows against the passing storm, creates flowers and foliage,
sets autumn woods on fire with the beauty of turning leaves
and touches mountaintops with snow crystals. ~ Wilferd Peterson

There it was, the land under 80 degrees, a land of stern magnificence, where icebergs rear up almost to the very mountaintops, and mountain rises above mountain; there it was, inviolate, alive to the raucous voice of millions of birds, the continuous staccato bark of foxes, the castanet click as the hoofs of great herds of deer fell in a swinging trot; there it was, surrounded by waters whose surface was slashed and sprayed by schools of walrus and whales that had swum there before ever man was born. ~ Jeannette Mirsky

Over human timescales, however, our disruption of geography will haunt us. Soil lost to erosion, coastal areas claimed by the sea, and mountaintops sacrificed on the altar of capitalism won't be restored in our lifetime. And these alterations will set in motion a cascade of side effects--hydrologic, biological, social, economic, and political--that will define the human agenda for centuries. ~ Marcia Bjornerud

Night's candles have burned out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops. Hope tinged with melancholy - like life. ~ William Shakespeare

At Oreanda they sat on a beach not far from the church, looked down at the sea, and were silent. Yalta was barely visible through the morning mist; white clouds rested motionlessly on the mountaintops. The leaves did not stir on the trees, cicadas twanged, and the monotonous muffled sound of the sea that rose from below spoke of the peace, the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it rumbled below when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it rumbles now, and it will rumble as indifferently and as hollowly when we are no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing advance of life upon earth, of unceasing movement towards perfection. ~ Anton Chekhov

With all respect to the Buddha and to the early Christian celibates, I sometimes wonder if all this teaching about nonattachment and the spiritual importance of monastic solitude might be denying us something quite vital. Maybe all that renunciation of intimacy denies us the opportunity to ever experience that very earthbound, domesticated, dirt-under-the-fingernails gift of the difficult, long-term, daily forgiveness {...} Maybe creating a big enough space within your consciousness to hold and accept someone's contradictions - someone's idiocies, even - is a kind of divine act. Perhaps transcendence can be found not only on solitary mountaintops or in monastic settings, but also at your own kitchen table, in the daily acceptance of your partner's most tiresome, irritating faults. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Love is the dancing cry of the soul,
Calling the body to worship
Like a shining whirlpool, or a spinning mayfly
So is love among the skies.
I leap across the mountaintops,
Madly singing the song of all songs
I float through the ether, intoxicated, thrilled
I think only of your love, your calling to me
And I dance the thousand dances of love,
All returning to you. ~ Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

God is not attracted to mountaintops or church steeples. God is drawn to suffering, and the dark places it surfaces, which is why sharing pain freely feels very much like love, and may be the same thing. (207) ~ Keith Ablow

However, in those last months of riding across the golden landscape of California she felt she was flying free, like a condor. She was awakened one morning by the whinnying of her horse with the full light of dawn in her face, surrounded by tall sequoias that, like centenary guards, had watched over her sleep, by gentle hills, and, far in the distance, purple mountaintops; at that moment she was filled with an atavistic happiness that was entirely new. She realized that she had lost the feeling of panic that had lain curled in the pit of her stomach like a rat, threatening to gnaw her entrails. Her fears had dissipated in the awesome grandeur of this landscape. To the measure that she confronted danger, she was becoming bolder: she had lost her fear of fear. "I am finding new strength in myself; I may always have had it and just didn't know because I'd never had to call on it. I don't know at what turn in the road I shed the person I used to be, Tao. Now I am only one of thousands of adventurers scattered along the banks of these crystal-clear rivers and among the foothills of these eternal mountains. Here men are proud, with no one above them but the sky overhead; they bow to no one because they are inventing equality. And I want to be one of them. Some are winners with sacks of gold slung over their backs; some, defeated, carry nothing but disillusion and debts, but they all believe they are masters of their destiny, of the ground they walk on, of the future, of their own u ~ Isabel Allende