“While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.”

St. 7.
A Psalm of Life (1839)
Source: Voices of the Night

Quoted in Saving Nature's Legacy : Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity (1994) by Reed F. Noss, Allen Y. Cooperrider, and Rodger Schlickeisen, p. 338
Context: One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

Source: The God of Small Things

Source: We'll Always Have Summer

Source: Just Listen

From an alleged Letter of to his Minister of the Interior on the Poor Laws. Pub. in The Press, Feb. 1, 1868.
Attributed

Source: DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution (2003/2017), Chapter 8, “Personal Genetics: The First of the Rest of Us” (p. 205)