An empty man is full of himself.

I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made -- unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.

We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Everyone needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word *reality* in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.