Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us. Robert Macfarlane
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More Quotes By Robert Macfarlane
  1. Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

  2. The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.

  3. What we bloodlessy call 'place' is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always 'in', never 'on'.

  4. The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

  5. From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking, ' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth...

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