“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. 

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.” 

Bill Bryson em A Short History of Nearly Everything

"- Velho homem. Li os teus livros, fizeram-me bem, conheci muita coisa que antes não poderia imaginar, ensinaste-me a ver as gentes e o mundo. Mas tenho vontade de conhecer as coisas, quero viajar, ver o mundo que está nos teus livros com os meus próprios olhos.

(…)

- (…) Mas vai, faz o que o teu coração pede, vai ver o mundo. Um dia hás-de de te fartar dele, e hás-de voltar, eu sei.

- Fartar-me do mundo? Com tanta coisa a aprender de novo, a receber e a comunicar?

- Vais ver, meu filho, que o mundo fora da ilha por vezes é um mundo de muitas ilhas e de pessoas tristes onde para ti que és um homem do mar, será difícil de viver.  Lembrar-te-ás com intensa nostalgia da pesca eu fazias, esta casa de tambores, a tua casa de tambores, as gentes da ilhas estão irremediavelmente pegadas às coisas mais insignificantes, a um mundo que construíram na infância, mas que já não é o mesmo mundo."

Vasco Martins excerto de A Verdadeira Dimensão

I Went To The Woods

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan- like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Henry David Thoreau em Walden or Life in the Woods

"Two years he walks the earth, no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarretes, ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, 'cause the west is the best and now after two rambling years comes the final and the greatest adventure, the climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp May 1992"

Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer's book Into The Wild

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as cold as ices."

Henry David Thoreau (Walden or Life In The Woods)