Best 470 quotes in «walking quotes» category

Focusing on the distance brings resistance but these steps of brevity feel heavenly & somehow still lead to a life of longevity.

For tramping is the grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar - but it is worth while.

For pilgrims walking...every footfall is doubled, landing at once on the actual road and also on the path of faith.

Happy is the man who finds a walking companion who knows how to keep silence and when to talk, who is in unison not only with yourself but with all the vibrant chords of nature around

From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.

For me, walking has become less physical transit than mental transportation. It is engaging. I have become, I fear, a difficult walking companion, liable to slow down and point at things. I can turn this off, but I love to have it on: a sense of wonder that I, and we all, have a predisposition to but have forgotten to enjoy.

He liked city walking. He didn't want to have to go to that place called countryside to take a walk. He wanted to stuff his hands in his pockets, set his internal compass vaguely east or south and wander till he was tired enough to get the bus home.

He awaits himself while walking, out of the icy circle to escape.

He put on a little knapsack and he walked through Indiana and Kentucky and North Carolina and Georgia clear to Florida. He walked among farmers and mountain people, among swamp people and fishermen. And everywhere people asked him why he was walking through the country. Because he loved true things he tried to explain. He said he was nervous and besides he wanted to see the country, smell the ground and look at grass and birds and trees, to savor the country, and there was no other way to do it save on foot.

He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'. A creature's 'foil' is its track. We easily forget that we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete - and these are substances not easily impressed. 'Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering,' writes Thomas Clark in his enduring prose-poem 'In Praise of Walking'. It's true that, once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways - shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets - say the name of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite - holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.

Hill-walkers are adventurers all, they know not when they set out what the results of the day's walk will be; yet it is a strange experience, is it not, that such bountiful gifts and refreshing fruits may come to him, -- that he may attain to this mood of tranquil meditation, out of which arise intermittent musings, half-conscious soliloquies, and a sort of feast of mental orderliness -- a frame of mind in which decisions are made without effort, and truth comes without argument? Every such adventure that is contained in this simple and primitive pastime, so near to mother earth, attracts not only the walker who would claim no other qualifications than that he loves to tramp the old highways and the hills, but philosophers and poets and men great in simplicity.

I ache to swim again. Walking’s for mammals.

I am fighting to stay alive not because I fear death, but because I love life.

I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

I am Falling in love again with autumn, The smell of warm cider, The orange color leaves, Pumpkins everywhere and the crisp breeze, People walking or riding their bikes, Folks jogging or going on hikes, I love autumn for so many reasons, I must admit- This is my favorite season

I climb the door instead of a tree Just to crawl with myself walking free What if I’m a lizard beneath my skin Changing my colours of the human I’ve been

I collect the walks of my life. Some people have asked me if I have walked so very far to merit such an activity, but I say to them, it's not about how far you have walked, but how thoroughly.

He has so little energy in his body that he can only walk to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway twice a day. After a few meters he is worn out, much worse than after the marathons he used to run. He was a triathlete, he earned a brown belt in judo, became Dutch champion in hockey, until he contracted pneumonia in 2005 and never recovered. Ever since, he has a headache, vertigo, and insomnia, but worst of all the fatigue: after minimal effort his muscles would lose all their strength and take days to recover. Only after a few years did he get a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS).

I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much - so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.

I am not afraid to walk alone.

I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.

I came to realize we are held in the arms of God and are utterly completely safe - in life and in death; whether walking alone or with others.

If I’ve learned anything from facing death, it is that life is not meant to be survived. Life is the greatest adventure there is. And why stop your adventuring when someone says the end may be near? The truth is, we never know when the end will actually come. None of us will avoid it forever. What’s the point in trying? Live fearlessly!

If it is time that you are talking to Don’t forget the path you are walking through Sudden flare of past might stalk you Never allow moments to mock you

I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.

If you cannot stand the traffic light, learn to walk.

If you can't write, read. If you can't read, walk. Or walk and read, then write.

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.

If you don't live right with God by WALKING IN THE LIGHT, a deceptive will ever so slowly creep in to your life. This slow, seemingly insignificant drift will cause you to end up with 'the spirit of religion', whilst all along thinking you are right with God.

If you are walking in silence without disturbing the silence then you really love the silence!

If you’re working class, they try to walk all over you. If you escape that and become a celebrity, they put you on walks of fame and name streets after you, so people can walk all over you in perpetuity.

If you walk a city, if you love a city, if you put in your miles and years with open heart and mind, the city will reveal itself to you. Maybe it won't become yours, but you will become its - its chronicler, its pilgrim, its ardent lover, its nonnative son or native daughter or defender.

I had a dream about you. You were so cute, and I was holding you for a long time. We went for a walk, happily strutting down the street. We saw a couple others but they weren’t having as much fun as we were. We arrived back home and I gave you a kiss on the nose and a bone.

If you seek creative ideas go walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professional, educated classes, with the texts it generated being consumed and reviewed in the same way as other travel literature: compared, criticised for inaccuracies, assessed for topographical or antiquarian interest, and so on.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.

I hope to repair certain important connections burned through by artificial speed, by inattentiveness. I walk, as everyone does, to see what lies ahead. I walk to remember.

I’m fine, considering I can’t walk anymore,” Pam replied, a sarcastic edge in her voice. “You look like your bringing news. What is it this time, I’m blind?

I’m a pedestrian, i walk under the sky and the magnetism of the stars that cohabit up there.

In 20,000 walks you're bound to learn a little.

I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or 'errance' - the action or rhythm of walking - was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God. The aim of a dervish was to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, toward the end of his tourney, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will...it was quite similar to an Aboriginal concept, 'Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.' By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor's Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song. The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves.

In every step you take, keep your feet firmly on the ground.

In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.

In life there are times you must only walk without any particular direction to find your random fate!

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.' I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world." [Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]