'It is a great art to saunter'

Henry David Thoreau had it right: Explore natural simplicity, harmonize with the Earth and cherish the beauty that one sees in one's travels. Enjoy.

"I have two doctors: my left leg and my right."

~ George Macaulay Trevelyan, British historian

"There is more to life than increasing its speed."

~Mahatma Gandhi

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

~Herman Melville

"I love the 19th-century idea of the flaneur, the poet wandering through the streets."

~Tom Hodgkinson, British writer

"Our way is not soft grass, it's a mountain path with lots of rocks. But it goes upward, forward, toward the sun.

~Ruth Westheimer

"If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk."

~Raymond Inmon

Joshua Tree National Park

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into the trees. The winds will blow their freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like falling leaves."

~John Muir

"If you want to know if your brain is flabby, feel your legs."

~Bruce Barton, American author

"All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."

~Frederick Nietzche

"People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care about us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet Earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own."

~Barbara Kingsolver

"There is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg—or arm—power, eating irons to one spoon. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are—and thereby set you free."

~Colin Fletcher, The River