Vaillant Quotes & Sayings

In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov. — John Vaillant

Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards. It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift. — George Vaillant

As Newman struggled free of parental domination, he achieved a less constricted morality and became more comfortable with himself. In that greater comfort, he moved toward a greater comfort with, and willingness to be responsible for, others. None of the great psychologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Freud and William James, had had anything to say about adult maturational processes like this. But over the decades, we at the Grant Study have watched fascinated as Adam Newman and his fellows changed and grew. — George E. Vaillant

Creativity can never be explained by appeal to reason alone. Like the birth of a child, creativity compels us not to explanation but to wonder and awe. — George Vaillant

It is not stress that kills us. It is effective adaptation to stress that allows us to live. — George Vaillant

The one certainty in tiger tracks is: follow them long enough and you will eventually arrive at a tiger, unless the tiger arrives at you first. — John Vaillant

The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once. — John Vaillant

The recent years of the Grant Study have shown that our lives when we are old are the sum of all of our loves. — George Vaillant

He realised that in a town a man cannot live as he wishes, but as other people wish. — John Vaillant

And this is precisely where the tension lies: Panthera tigris and Homo sapiens are actually very much alike, and we are drawn to many of the same things, if for slightly different reasons. Both of us demand large territories; both of us have prodigious appetites for meat; both of us require control over our living space and are prepared to defend it, and both of us have an enormous sense of entitlement to the resources around us. If a tiger can poach on another's territory, it probably will, and so, of course, will we. A key difference, however, is that tigers only take what they need. — John Vaillant

Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey
even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior. — John Vaillant

I've read a tiger's not dangerous,
They say the tiger won't attack
But one thing's not clear to me.
Has he read this, too? Does he know? — John Vaillant

There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: "The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife," and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset's first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. "If you live on the edge of the circle," he explained in a documentary film, "that is the present moment. What's inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What's outside has yet to be experienced. The knife's edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick," says Davidson, "is to live on the edge. — John Vaillant

By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book. — John Vaillant

The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning. — John Vaillant

Aging happy and well, instead of sad and sick, is at least under some personal control. We have considerable control over our weight, our exercise, our education, and our abuse of cigarettes and alcohol. With hard work and/or therapy, our relationships with our spouses and our coping styles can be changed for the better. A successful old age may lie not so much in our stars and genes as in ourselves. — George Vaillant

Our listeners asked us:
"What is chaos?"
We're answering:
"We do not comment on economic policy. — John Vaillant

Like Trush, Sheriff Gorunov is a born Alpha, a handsome, fire-breathing dragon of a man who smokes with an alarming vigor: cigarette clamped between his canines at the point where filter and tobacco meet, the act of inhaling fully integrated into breath and speech such that there is no discernible pause, only billowing smoke that seems to be a natural by-product of a voice that booms even in the confines of his quiet kitchen. — John Vaillant

What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language? — John Vaillant

British Columbia has been described as a banana republic, only with bigger bananas, — John Vaillant

Witnesses, native and Russian alike, agree that there is something almost metaphysical about the tiger's ability to will itself into nonbeing - to, in effect, cloak itself. In the Bikin valley, it is generally believed that if a tiger has decided to attack you, you will not be able to see it. With the exception of the polar bear, which also hunts by stealth, there is no other land mammal this big whose survival depends on its ability to disappear. — John Vaillant

The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points to a straightforward five-word conclusion: Happiness is love. Full stop. — George Vaillant

Happiness is love. Full stop. — George E. Vaillant

It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all. — George E. Vaillant

In particular, Vaillant says, it is the experience of loving and being loved that most closely predicts how we react to the hardships of life; human attachments are the ultimate source of resilience. "The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points, at least to me, to a straightforward five-word conclusion," Vaillant writes. "'Happiness equals love. Full stop. — Jonah Lehrer

Whether we live to a vigorous old age lies not so much in our stars or in our genes but in ourselves. — George Vaillant

Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees ... to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929 — John Vaillant

Markov died while trying to fit a small, slippery shotgun shell into a narrow gun barrel, in the dark, at thirty below zero - with a tiger bearing down on him from ten yards away. — John Vaillant

Joy is connection ... The more areas in your life you can make connection, the better, — George Vaillant

In The Jaguar's Children we enter the dangerous borderlands between countries and generations; myth and magic; human community and the vast, infinitely mysterious, wild environment. Here, John Vaillant proves that his heart and imagination are as expansive and fierce as his radiant intellect. Never have I encountered a writer with more energy or compassion. — Melanie Rae Thon

Life ain't easy. Terrible things happen to everyone. You have to keep your sense of humor, give something of yourself to others, make friends who are younger than you, learn new things, and have fun. — George Vaillant

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant's brilliant non-fiction about humankind's tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it. — John Burnham Schwartz

To say a tiger is an "outside" animal is an understatement that is best appreciated when a tiger is inside. — John Vaillant

Their houses are the size of small airplane hangars; their carved — John Vaillant

The most terrifying and important test for a human being is to be in absolute isolation," he explained. "A human being is a very social creature, and ninety percent of what he does is done only because other people are watching. Alone, with no witnesses, he starts to learn about himself - who is he really? — John Vaillant

It's very hard, for most of us to tolerate being loved. — George E. Vaillant

The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people. — George E. Vaillant

He takes two tea bags in a four-ounce cup and he doesn't mince words: when a pair of earnest British journalists once asked him how he thought the tigers could be saved, his answer, "AIDS," caught them off guard.
"But don't you care about people?" one of them asked.
"Not really," he replied. "Especially not the Chinese. — John Vaillant

The tiger is a bellwether
one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once, casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps "mature" is a better word) beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is neither our enemy nor our slave. — John Vaillant

We can laugh from either joy or happiness, but we weep only from grief or joy ... Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy in reunion ... without the pain of captivity, we don't experience the joy of freedom. — George Vaillant

Vaillant's study and numerous others on happiness, success, failure, and motivation all confirm the same thing: health comes first, happiness is love and connection, and success requires adaptability. To be "happy-well," we must tame the imbalanced tiger in us and instead embrace our inner, balanced dolphin. — Shimi Kang

Nothing exists now but the tiger, filling his field of vision like a bad accident, like the end of the world: a pair of blazing yellow lanterns over a temple door framed with ivory columns. — John Vaillant

Our lives become the sum of all whom we have loved. It is important not to waste anyone. One task of living out the last half of life is excavating and recovering all of those whom we loved in the first half. Thus, the recovery of lost loves becomes an important way in which the past affects the present. — George Vaillant

If you want to treat an illness that has no easy cure, first of all, treat them with hope. — George Vaillant

Since well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest. The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the men
some more fluently than others. — John Vaillant

It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car. — John Vaillant

Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse — George Vaillant

Anxiety and depression are the price you pay for a well-lived life. — George Vaillant