21 Quotes Tagged: Walking

The walker and naturalist does not wear a hat, or a shoe, or a coat, to be looked at, but for other uses.

Is not each withered leaf that I see in my walks something which I have traveled to find? —traveled, who can tell how far? What a fool he must be who thinks that his El Dorado is anywhere but where he lives!

I come to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home.

Most of us are still related to our native fields as the navigator to undiscovered islands in the sea. We can any autumn discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty or sweetness. So long as I saw one or two kinds of berries in my walks whose names I did not know, the proportion of the unknown seemed indefinitely if not infinitely great.

It is a good policy to be stirring about your affairs, for the reward of activity and energy is that if you do not accomplish the object you had professed to yourself, you do accomplish something else. So, in my botanizing or natural history walks, it commonly turns out that, going for one thing, I get another thing.

In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and head-lands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round, —for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, —do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.

I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot.

I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here. But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him!

What's the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.

Walking and talking - that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

How many things concur to keep a man at home, to prevent his yielding to his inclination to wander! If I would extend my walk a hundred miles, I must carry a tent on my back for shelter at night or in the rain, or at least I must carry a thick coat to be prepared for a change in the weather.

A warm, dripping rain, heard on ones umbrella as on a snug roof, and on the leaves without, suggests comfort. We go abroad with a slow but sure contentment, like turtles under their shells.

How can one help being an early riser and walker in that season when the birds begin to twitter and sing in the morning?

You cannot walk too early in new-fallen snow to get the sense of purity, novelty, and unexploredness.

I have got to that pass with my friend that our words do not pass with each other for what they are worth. We speak in vain; there is no one to hear. He finds fault with me that I walk alone, when I pine for want of a companion; that I commit my thoughts to a diary even on my walks, instead of seeking to share them generously with a friend; curses my practice even. Awful it is to contemplate, I pray that, if I am the cold intellectual skeptic whom he rebukes, his curse may take effect, and wither and dry up those sources of my life, and my journal no longer yield me pleasure nor life.