QUOTES FROM MASTER HORSEMEN & PHILOSOPHERS
A metaphor's power is in its meaning, not its truth. WE give the metaphors their meaning. ~Adapted fromTravels in a Stone Canoe

You don't take the journey. The journey takes you. ~"Travels in a Stone Canoe", Harvey Arden & Steve Wall

Listen to the horse.  Try to find out what the horse is trying to tell you. All we are trying to do is fix things up to where he can find them; then it's the horse's idea. ~ Tom Dorrance

Horses are intelligent and they can make decisions. This is the reason that they can sense what a person wants them to do and will try to understand a person’s intent.  Through his natural instinct of self-preservation, a horse will respond to two kinds of feel that a person can present. He will respond to a person’s indirect feel, which means that he will either react to or ignore a person’s presence – and how a horse responds depends entirely on the person.  This indirect feel is what you have out in the pasture or corral, when you don’t have any physical contact with the horse, like a halter or snaffle bit. A horse will also respond to direct feel, which is when you have a physical connection with the horse through some part of your body, the halter or the snaffle, or a rope any place on his body, even if it’s connected to the saddle horn.  ~ Bill Dorrance

Pride and ego get in people's way, it gets in the horse's way. ~ Ray Hunt

Horses don't do wrong things - horses are never wrong.  ~ Ray Hunt
I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns...When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoofs is more musical than the pipe of Hermes...When bestride him I soar, I am a hawk...
~ William Shakespeare

 
For what the horse does under compulsion, as Simon also observes, is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer. ~Xenophon
God forbid that I should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses.
~R. Graham

"A technique can have a "Here, horse, let me help you" feel behind it. Or it can have a, "You better do this or else" feel behind it. The feel behind the technique can be the factor that decides whether the technique is effective or not." ~Mark Rashid

"It would take years to train Templado," Pignon said. "He forgave me nothing. The slightest error, the slightest faux pas on my part, and I was made to pay dear." Whether 'man was training horse' or 'horse was training man' was unclear, the result however was a new relationship was forged, horse and man as a collaboration of equals." ~Frédéric Pignon, Cavalia

"Isness is the glorious state of God manifested in His entire creative spendor here and on all planes.

It is the active form of being, more a becoming, an awakened journey carrying one towards the adventure of vibrant aliveness, L.I.F.E. (love in Finitie Expression) forever. ~Liz Mitten Ryan

"Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found out that it was ourselves. " ~Robert Frost