I nauseate walking.
WILLIAM CONGREVE
When you have worn out your shoes, the strength of the shoe leather has passed into the fiber of your body…. He is the richest man who pays the largest debt to his shoemaker.
EMERSON
The longing to be primitive is a disease of culture.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
There is something about the idea of an encounter with nature that has a powerful hold on the American imagination—an idea of independence, of self-reliance, self-sufficiency and autonomy. These are ideas that lie very close to the heart of the cultural values we prize most, and that seem to be most threatened by the style of modern, urban, industrial society.
JOSEPH L. SAX
If you pick ’em up, O Lord, I’ll put ’em down
ANONYMOUS
“The Prayer of the Tired Walker”
Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover 25 miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed….
When crowds assemble…to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked 25 miles that day.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
I drew my bride, beneath the moon,
Across my threshold; happy hour!
But, ah, the walk that afternoon
We saw the water-flags in flower!
COVENTRY PATMORE
I want a divorce.
BARBARA BAILEY MARCUS
(Response suggested for Mrs. Coventry Patmore)
If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
THOREAU
Huh, your feet must be stronger than your head!
STRANGER
To Colin Fletcher,
during thousand-mile walk
The civilized man has built a coach, but he has lost the use of his feet.
EMERSON
In properly developed countries, the inhabitants regard walkers with grave suspicion and have taught their dogs to do the same.
ALAN BOOTH
If I couldn’t walk fast and far, I should explode and perish.
CHARLES DICKENS
The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.
THOREAU
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
GANDHI
“I’m sure nobody walks much faster than I do.”
“He can’t do that,” said the King, “or else he’d have been here first.”
LEWIS CARROLL
Through the Looking-Glass
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
THOREAU
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone…. because freedom is of the essence.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, and experience so much, never have I been so much myself—if I may use that expression—as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Take this simple test to see if you qualify for solo camping. Shine a flashlight in one ear. If the beam shines out the other ear, do not go into the woods alone.
BRUCE COCHRAN
Everything You Never Wanted to Know
About Camping
In solitude
What happiness? Who can enjoy alone,
Or all enjoying, what contentment find?
MILTON
Paradise Lost
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
That inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.
WORDSWORTH
O Solitude! where are the charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
WILLIAM COWPER
“Verses Supposed to Be Written
by Alexander Selkirk”
Bear bells provide an element of safety for hikers in grizzly country. The tricky part is getting them on the bears.
BRUCE COCHRAN
Everything You Never Wanted to Know
About Camping
The true male never yet walked
Who liked to listen when his mate talked.
ANNA WICKHAM
(Mrs. Patrick Hepburn)
Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad: and thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.
DEUTERONOMY XXIII: 13
He went back through the Wet Wild Woods, waving his wild tail, and walking by his wild lone. But he never told anybody.
RUDYARD KIPLING
“The Cat That Walked by Himself”
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
FRANCES CORNFORD
“To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train”
Oh, he’s a genuine backpacker, all right. He’s got a filed-down toothbrush.
OVERHEARD BY COLIN FLETCHER
Who walks with beauty has no need of fear;
The sun and moon and stars keep pace with him;
Invisible hands restore the ruined year,
And time, itself, grows beautifully dim.
DAVID MORTON
There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?
GEORGE BORROW
Lavengro
You ask me:
Why do I live
on this green mountain?
This is
another sky
No likeness
to that human world below.
LI PO
Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year
I am still in love.
GARY SNYDER
What men call gallantry, and gods adult’ry,
Is much more common where the climate’s sultry.
BYRON
Don Juan
Three things there are that ease the heart—water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to go to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
LEWIS CARROLL
Alice in Wonderland
The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a wilderness.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer’s hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Dear Uncle Colin: I’m haveing fun at camp My counselors he Read one of your Books anb he said it gave him sore Feet.
POSTCARD FROM HONORARY NEPHEW
Hi-Rise Campsites, Inc., has announced plans to construct a 20-story campground in downtown New Orleans…. Plans for the $4 million project call for 8 lower floors of parking and 12 upper stories with 240 individual sites equipped with utility hookups for campers…and campsites carpeted with artificial turf, and a rooftop pool.
“This will be unique—the first of its kind anywhere,” said Wesley Hurley of Hi-Rise. “It is designed for today’s different kind of camping. People don’t want the woodsy bit now; they want to camp in comfort near the city.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORT
[Sub-historical footnote: The facility was never built.]
I find that the three truly great times for thinking thoughts are when I am standing in the shower, sitting on the john, or walking. And the greatest of these, by far, is walking.
COLIN FLETCHER
It is interesting that in both Japanese Zen and Plains Indian animism, there are walking and sitting forms of contemplation.
ROB SCHULTHEIS
The Hidden West
Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.
DAISETZ T. SUZUKI
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding,
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
WALLACE STEVENS
He likes the country, but in truth must own,
Most likes it when he studies it in town.
WILLIAM COWPER
Thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
THOMAS HUXLEY
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of a plant or animal, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part of it is good, whether we understand it or not.
ALDO LEOPOLD
Solvency is entirely a matter of temperament and not of income.
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
To understand life, man must learn to shudder.
QUOTED BY LOREN EISLEY
Comedy is tragedy plus time.
ATTRIBUTED TO CAROL BURNETT’S
MOTHER
Humor and knowledge are the two great hopes of civilization.
KONRAD LORENZ
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.
THOREAU
To enjoy the full flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
ROBERT HEINLEIN
Time Enough for Love
Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
EDMUND BURKE
The beginning of wisdom is a salutary shock.
ARNOLD TOYNBEE
All paths lead nowhere, so it is important to choose a path that has heart.
CARLOS CASTANEDA
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.
WILLIAM BLAKE
Man…walks up the stairs of his concepts, [and] emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
JOHN STEINBECK
Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.
JULIAN HUXLEY
…man, in his paranoid arrogance, has perpetrated the greatest blasphemy of all time by stating in the Bible, “So God created Man in his own image.”…There is a God all around us which man has refused to accept but he abuses and exploits her forgetting that she of all deities is our own true God…. Man’s greatest enemy is his own kind and upon an understanding of this fact depends his chances of survival in the future.
PHILIP E. GLOVER
Tsavo Research Project, Kenya
The human race is bound to defile, I’ve often noticed it,
Whatever they can reach or name, they’d shit on the morning star If they could reach….
A day will come when the earth will scratch herself and smile and rub off humanity.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
It is in the long run essential to the growth of any new and high civilization that small groups of people can escape from their neighbors and from their governments, to go and live as they please in the wilderness.
FREEMAN DYSON
Disturbing the Universe
Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now…. Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune (set in the far future)
The…scientists were wrong…the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
FRANK HERBERT
Dune
Change is inevitable, progress possible.
JULIAN HUXLEY
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.
THOREAU
Grow up as soon as you can. It pays. The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty…. The young are slaves to dreams; the old, servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
HERVEY ALLEN
There are three terrible ages of childhood: 1 to 10, 10 to 20, and 20 to 30.
CLEVELAND AMORY
Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.
ST. JOHN XII:35
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older.
MONTAIGNE
Growing old isn’t so bad—when you consider the alternative.
MAURICE CHEVALIER
We will go no more to the woods, the laurel-trees are cut.
THÉODORE DE BANVILLE
And as I turn me home,
My shadow walks before.
ROBERT BRIDGES