"I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people and their future and their fate."

~Ansel Adams (The famous photographer describing the purpose of his art was to reveal that beauty to others and to inspire them to the same calling of respecting nature and preserving it for future generations.)

"Love life, engage in it, give it all you've got, love it with a passion, because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it"

A quote I like and try to live by. It's by the poet Maya Angelou.

"There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads - you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

An excerpt from one of my favorite poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson titled "Ulysses".

The more we risk, the more alive we are. In the end, the chances we never took in life are often the ones we'll regret the most.