LEAVE BEHIND QUOTES

Cut out or copy any of these that speak to you and leave them in various places on your wanderings. Sharing the wandering philosophy is our way of giving back and hopefully awakening a similar passion in others.

As art cannot be taught and there are no human teachers, there are only two teachers, if you want a teacher at all: one is your own childhood, your own self; the other is nature.

—FRIEDENSREICH HUNDERTWASSER

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Each of us inevitable; Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth.

–WALT WHITMAN, “SALUT AU MONDE”

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Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1851 JOURNAL ENTRY

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle south-west, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction.

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It is not down in any map; true places never are.

—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK

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Never trust any thought you have while sitting down.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

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Go to the pine if you want to learn about pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself.

—BASHŌ

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

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The path is not somewhere in the sky, It is in our hearts.

—THE BUDDHA

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Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

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For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the glove granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

—ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES

What do you suppose will satisfy the soul except to walk free and own no superior?

–WALT WHITMAN, “LAWS FOR CREATIONS”

This is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

–ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS

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If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. . . . In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

–HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

—WALT WHITMAN, FROM THE PREFACE OF LEAVES OF GRASS