No one receives the honor of breathing this air who has not prepared to move a mountain.
From The Soul Without the Story, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
The woman who walks the brown dog came past the maple today with a cane she did not have in August, and she stopped under me a while to get her breath back. I used to think a breath was the cheapest thing going, a thing you got for free and spent without counting. From the branch I watched her take four of them before she could start up the hill again, and each one cost her something. No one receives the honor of breathing this air who has not prepared to move a mountain. Switch says I am being grand about lungs, and he may be right; he has never been short of one. I have been looking at my own all afternoon and I cannot work out whether the hill was the mountain or the hill was only the hill.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- Nothing is invisible until someone looks and does not see.
- We do not stand on the surface of the earth, but on roots that go much deeper.
- As there is one sun, there is one river that courses all our veins.
- The deepest root finds the purest water.
- The wind moves the trees, but what moves the wind?
- No amount of building bridges out will spare you the work of building a bridge in.