What Philosophers Have Said About Hiking and the Outdoors

Purchases made through some links on this page may provide The Detour Effect with commissions (at no extra cost to you). Thank you!

I recently stumbled upon Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of living in “bad faith,” which is to live in denial of the amount of freedom one really holds. Christa Davis Acampora explains that, “projects of bad faith fundamentally aim at fleeing our freedom. We pursue it in order to mollify anxiety in the face of freedom.” 

As a hiker and nomadic traveler, my mind immediately applied this quote to themes of outdoor adventure. While some explorers dive hungrily into the wilderness in a quest for or demonstration of true freedom, others subconsciously see such unbridled freedom as daunting. They may tell themselves they can’t embark on an adventure because it would be irresponsible, or some other “reasonable” excuse. Rather than confront one’s fear, it’s easier to make reference to the invisible chains that hold you back, to claim that such freedom is not actually available to you. I suppose if that is what you believe, then it is true; these shackles are of the mind. The frightening amount of freedom you have to change or even blow up your life at any given moment is actually quite significant. 

This got me curious about what other philosophers throughout history may have said about the outdoors, hiking, nature, and freedom, or at least what famous thinkers have said that I can personally interpret in relation to these subjects. I’ve collected some of my favorite philosopher quotes on the outdoors and hiking below. In the course of my research I became annoyed to realize that a lot of my favorite quotes are from authors or environmentalists whose biographies don’t technically consider them to be “philosophers,” so I gave them their own section at the end.

I fact checked to make sure all of these philosophers actually wrote or said the quotes attributed to them; some works like Emile and Twilight of the Idols are public domain and freely available to read online. If I was not able to prove the source, I noted so.

Featured image “ink jar and quills” by studentofrhythm is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“…nature made man happy and good, but that society depraves him and makes him miserable.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues

“Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“To travel on foot is to travel in the fashion of Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras. I find it hard to understand how a philosopher can bring himself to travel in any other way; how he can tear himself from the study of the wealth which lies before his eyes and beneath his feet.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“What varied pleasures we enjoy in this delightful way of travelling, not to speak of increasing health and a cheerful spirit. I notice that those who ride in nice, well-padded carriages are always wrapped in thought, gloomy, fault-finding, or sick; while those who go on foot are always merry, light-hearted, and delighted with everything. How cheerful we are when we get near our lodging for the night! How savoury is the coarse food! How we linger at table enjoying our rest! How soundly we sleep on a hard bed! If you only want to get to a place you may ride in a post-chaise; if you want to travel you must go on foot.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education

“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Anger is needed to leave, to walk. That doesn’t come from outside. In the hollow of the belly the pain of being here, the impossibility of remaining where you are, of being buried alive, of simply staying.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“So it’s best to walk alone, except that one is never entirely alone. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: ‘I have a great deal of company in the house, especially in the morning when nobody calls.’ To be buried in Nature is perpetually distracting. Everything talks to you, greets you, demands your attention: trees, flowers, the colour of the roads. The sigh of the wind, the buzzing of insects, the babble of streams, the impact of your feet on the ground: a whole rustling murmur that responds to your presence. Rain, too. A light and gentle rain is a steady accompaniment, a murmur you listen to, with its intonations, outbursts, pauses: the distinct plopping of drops splashing on stone, the long melodious weave of sheets of rain falling steadily. It’s impossible to be alone when walking, with so many things under our gaze which are given to us through the inalienable grasp of contemplation.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it’s essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don’t tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else’s pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate repetition of the possible.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“In walking, far from any vehicle or machine, from any mediation, I am replaying the earthly human condition, embodying once again man’s inborn, essential destitution. That is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“The true direction of walking is not towards otherness (other worlds, other cultures); it is towards the edge of civilized worlds, whatever they may be. Walking is setting oneself apart: at the edge of those who work, at the edges of high-speed roads, at the edge of the producers of profit and poverty, exploiters, labourers, and at the edge of those serious people who always have something better to do than receive the pale gentleness of a winter sun or the freshness of a spring breeze.”

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Nature was the place where one could escape the world of man-made constructions of race and identity. Living isolated in the hills we had very little contact with the world of white dominator culture. Away from the hills, dominator culture and its power over our lives were constant.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“For many years, and even now, generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the south, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. If we think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept a mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche. And we can know that when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“She did not drive. No need to drive if you want your place on earth to be a world you can encompass walking. There were other folks like her in the world of my growing up, folks who preferred their feet walking solidly on the earth to being behind the wheel of an automobile. In childhood we were fascinated by the walkers, by the swinging arms and wide strides they made to swiftly move forward, covering miles in a day but always walking a known terrain, leaving, always coming back to the known reality, walking with one clear intent – the will to remain rooted to familiar ground and the certainty of knowing one’s place.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Nature was the foundation of our counter-hegemonic black subculture. Nature was the place of victory. In the natural environment, everything had its place, including humans. In that environment everything was likely to be shaped by the reality of mystery. There dominator culture (the system of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) could not wield absolute power. For in that world, nature was more powerful. Nothing and no one could completely control nature. In childhood I experienced a connection between an unspoiled natural world and the human desire for freedom.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Folks who lived in the hills were committed to living free. Hillbilly folk chose to live above the law, believing in the right of each individual to determine the manner in which they would live their lives. Living among Kentucky mountain folk was my first experience of a culture based on anarchy. Folks living in the hills believed that freedom meant self-determination. One might live with less, live in a makeshift shack and yet feel empowered because the habits of informing daily life were made according to one’s own values and beliefs. In the hills individuals felt they had governance over their lives. They made their own rules.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“I need to live where I can walk. I need to be able to walk to work, to the store, to a place where I can sit and drink tea and fellowship. Walking, I will establish my presence, as one who is claiming the earth, creating a sense of belonging, a culture of place.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Away from the country, in the city, rules were made by unknown others and were imposed and enforced. In the hills of my girlhood, white and black folks often lived in a racially integrated environment, with boundaries determined more by chosen territory than race. The notion of ‘private property’ was an alien one; the hills belonged to everyone or so it seemed to me in my childhood. In those hills there was nowhere I felt I could not roam, nowhere I could not go.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“To truly create a social ethical context wherein masses of American citizens can empathize with the life experiences of Appalachians, we must consistently challenge dehumanizing public representations of poverty and the poor. Restoring to our nation the understanding that people can be materially poor yet have abundant lives rich in engagement with nature, with local culture, with spiritual values is essential to any progressive struggle to halt mountaintop removal. Seeing and understanding that abundance means not only that we must collectively as a nation change our thinking about poverty, it means we must see a value in life that is above and beyond profit motives.”

bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the ground, and they are condemned like leeches to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them at the particular spot where they happen to be stuck. Close by, perhaps, there may be a richer soil or a more sheltered and sunnier nook; but they cannot migrate, nor have they even eyes or imagination by which to picture the enviable neighbouring lot of which chance has deprived them.”

George Santayana on the privilege of locomotion, “The Philosophy of Travel” in The Virginia Quarterly Review

“The most radical form of travel, and the most tragic, is migration. Looking at her birthplace the soul may well recoil; she may find it barren, threatening, or ugly. The very odiousness of the scene may compel her to conceive a negative, a contrast, an ideal: she will dream of El Dorado and the Golden Age, and rather than endure the ills she hath she may fly to anything she knows not of. This hope is not necessarily deceptive: in travel, as in being born, interest may drown the discomfort of finding oneself in a foreign medium: the solitude and liberty of the wide world may prove more stimulating than chilling. Yet migration like birth is heroic: the soul is signing away her safety for a blank cheque.”

– George Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel” in The Virginia Quarterly Review

“The mountain-climber, the arctic explorer, the passionate hunter or yachtsman, chooses his sport probably for mixed reasons: because he loves nature; because having nothing to do he is in need of exercise and must do something or other; or because custom, vanity, or rivalry has given him that bent; but the chief reason, if he is a genuine traveller for travel’s sake, is that the world is too much with us, and we are too much with ourselves. We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

– George Santayana, “The Philosophy of Travel” in The Virginia Quarterly Review

“I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived ‘from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, ‘There goes a Sainte-Terrer,’ a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return – prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. 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.”

Henry David Thoreau’s lecture “Walking” was later published as an essay by Atlantic Monthly

“It is desirable that a man… live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.”

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“An increasingly pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches.”

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am. A reluctant enthusiast and part-time crusader. A half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the West. It is even more important to enjoy it while you can, while it’s still there. So get out there, hunt, fish, mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the Griz, climb a mountain, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and elusive air. Sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness of the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves. Keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive. And I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in safe deposit boxes and their eyes hypnotized by their desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”

Edward Abbey; everyone says this is from a lecture to environmentalists in Missoula, Montana, and in Colorado, published in High Country News under the title “Joy, Shipmates, Joy!”, but that article is here and I can’t find the quote in it.

“My God! I’m thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives – the domestic routine (same old wife every night), the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones –! ah Christ!, I’m thinking, at the same time that i’m waving goodby to that hollering idiot on the shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote! Such are my – you wouldn’t call them thoughts, would you? – such are my feelings, a mixture of revulsion and delight, as we float away on the river, leaving behind for a while all that we most heartily and joyfully detest. That’s what the first taste of the wild does to a man, after having been too long penned up in the city.”

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.”

John Muir, The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West

“I’m losing the precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

John Muir quoted by Samuel Hall Young in Alaska Days with John Muir

“Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God’s wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled, and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy-laden year…give a month at least to this precious reserve. The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.”

John Muir, The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

Most people are on the world, not in it – have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

Sitzfleisch [sitting still/sitting flesh/a sedentary life] is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have any value.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer

“Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement – in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels.“

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How To Become What You Are (I struggled to find this quote in Ecce Homo until I found another translation, it’s on page 32 here: “Remain seated as little as possible, put no trust in any thought that is not born in the open, to the accompaniment of free bodily motion – nor in one in which even the muscles do not celebrate a feast. All prejudices take their origin in the intestines. A sedentary life, as I have already said elsewhere, is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.”)

“Perhaps walking is best imagined as an ‘indicator species,’ to use an ecologist’s term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“…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.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use…time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space – for wilderness and for public space – must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming silence in which solitude seems as natural to your species as to any other, words strange rocks you may or may not turn over.”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are. This dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastnesses…”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“…to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. ‘Longing,’ says the poet Robert Hass, ‘because desire is full of endless distances.'”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett’s] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.”

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition – placing one foot in front of the other – can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress.”

John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

“Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard University lecture “Progress of Culture” (I’ve also seen it called “Aspects of Culture”)

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos…”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.”

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

“If a man starts out for an instant to get something better than nature, then I say, God help him.”

Walt Whitman quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6

“I think our people are getting entirely too decent. They like nice white hands, men and women. They are too much disturbed by dirt. They need the open air, coarse work – physical tasks: something to do away from the washstand and the bathtub. God knows, I’m not opposed to clean hands. But clean hands, too, may be a disgrace.”

Walt Whitman quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden vol 1

“Nature follows close upon the mood of the mind that contemplates her – is moody as it is moody, bright as it is bright, laughs in its laughter, weeps in its tears.”

Walt Whitman quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6

“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.”

Bertrand Russell, Nobel Lecture “What Desires Are Politically Important?“

“Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy. This, incidentally, was the opinion of Jefferson, who on this ground deplored the horse. Language would have failed him if he could have foreseen the motor car.”

Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory And Other Essays

“Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! On my life, There’s more of wisdom in it.”

William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned” from Lyrical Ballads

“Far from the world I walk, and from all care.”

William Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence” from Poems, in Two Volumes

“A good hobby may be a solitary revolt against the commonplace, or it may be the joint conspiracy of a congenial group. That group may, on occasion, be the family. In either event it is a rebellion, and if a hopeless one, all the better. I cannot imagine a worse jumble than to have the whole body politic suddenly ‘adopt’ all the foolish ideas that smolder in happy discontent beneath the conventional surface of society. There is no such danger. Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals, and will grow no faster than other new functions. Science is just beginning to discover what incredible regimentation prevails among the ‘free’ savages, and the freer mammals and birds. A hobby is perhaps creation’s first denial of the ‘peck-order’ that burdens the gregarious universe, and of which the majority of mankind is still a part.”

Aldo Leopold, “A Man’s Leisure Time,” published in Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold

“The modern dogma is comfort at any cost…We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness.”

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto-trunk and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage.”

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.”

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one can not walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one’s health and it were constantly one station ahead – I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it – but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can only be found in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”

Søren Kierkegaard, from a letter to his niece Henriette “Jette” Lund

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom…Freedom succumbs in this dizziness….Freedom, when it rises again, sees that it is guilty….Anxiety is a [weakness] in which freedom faints.”

Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

Are they philosophers?

The writers below have really never been described as “philosophers,” so I’m giving them their own section. These are quotes about hiking, travel, and the outdoors that I find interesting but that don’t fit the criteria of the rest of the post.

If interested in more quotes like this, here is a great list of trail-specific quotes from adventurers and authors like Colin Fletcher and Paul Theroux.

“We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home; in towns and cities; in shops, offices, stores, banks – anywhere that we may be placed – with the necessity always present of being on time and up to our work; of providing for the dependent ones; of keeping up, catching up, or getting left.”

George Washington Sears aka “Nessmuk,” Woodcraft and Camping

“By the age of five, I believed I was a child born of sun-lit Earth and deep blue sky. When I looked at my skin, I saw the color of dry land in Southern California and the Southwest. And when I looked at my veins, it seemed that sky flowed in them. I believed I was made of sky and of land. That was what anchored the child-me.”

Lauret Savoy, quoted in Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World

“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.”

Ben Montgomery, Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

“The man who goes afoot, prepared to camp anywhere and in any weather, is the most independent fellow on earth.”

Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft

“The man with the knapsack is never lost. No matter whither he may stray, his food and shelter are right with him, and home is wherever he may choose to stop”.

Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft

“It is one of the blessings of wilderness life that it shows us how few things we need in order to be perfectly happy.”

Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft

The purpose of a shared narrative around the outdoors “is not to tell people how they should be, but to inspire people to be who they are. To discover and be that person that they know that they want to be and that they are thus beautiful.”

Dr. John Francis interview quote in the New York Times

“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“All horsepower corrupts.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“The notion that I had walked twelve hundred miles since Rotterdam filled me with a legitimate feeling of something achieved. But why should the thought that nobody knew where I was, as though I were in flight from bloodhounds or from worshipping corybants bent on dismemberment, generate such a feeling of triumph? It always did.”

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it. For this reason your customary thoughts, all except the rarest of your friends, even most of your luggage – everything, in fact, which belongs to your everyday life, is merely a hindrance.”

Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches

“There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world – the settled and the nomad – and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.”

Freya Stark, A Winter in Arabia: A Journey Through Yemen

“Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.”

Freya Stark, Perseus in the Wind

“The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer journey. One can have one without the other. It is better to have both.”

Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters

If you walk alone, you enter into “the great fellowship of the Open Road. Alone, you have plenty of time for meditation, and, hungry at the end of the day’s journey for companionship, you are in a receptive mood for those brief but priceless meetings which only trampers know.”

Robert Louis Stevenson; I can’t find this quote in his “Walking Tours” or elsewhere, but Kerry Segrave and Ben Montgomery have both referenced this quote in their own works.

“That is a very powerful thing, to tell someone who feels perhaps they own very little, to find out they own the world.”

Shelton Johnson, interviewed for NBC News about being a Park Ranger

“All you need to get to heaven is a good pair of boots.”

Shelton Johnson, Gloryland (I have not yet been able to locate this quote within the book)

“People need immediate places to refresh, reinvent themselves. Our surroundings built and natural alike, have an immediate and a continuing effect on the way we feel and act, and on our health and intelligence. These places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy. In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.”

Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place. I was not able to access this book online so I can’t prove it’s the source of the quote; I am trusting Jim Schmid on this one.

“There is a period near the beginning of every man’s life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place.”

E.B. White, “The Years of Wonder”

“It was like a movie all the time. Everybody around me was a great story that never stopped, and for the first time, I realized how much freedom you have to do what you want, how you could live going from place to place.”

Daniel Johnston quoted in SPIN Magazine

“As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room…Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.”

Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“There’s nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.”

Jack Kerouac’s “The Vanishing American Hobo” essay was reprinted in Lonesome Traveler

While compiling this list of philosopher quotes about nature, hiking, pilgrimages, and the outdoors, I was delighted to learn about voices and perspectives that aren’t coming from your stereotypical Aristotle or Plato. I can’t wait to read Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks Who Shape How We See the Natural World, and Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking. 17 Years of Silence. As a hiker, I can’t believe I’d never heard of either of these works before. As a woman, I’m also surprised I had never heard of Carolyn Merchant, Karen Warren, and the concept of ecofeminism. It’s a bit painful to see such hegemony in who society deems worthy of the title “philosopher.” I can only assume people of color feel the same way.

Of course, nature is for everyone, it is our inherent birthright. No philosophy need tell us this. We know it every time we breathe air into our lungs or expect water to quench our thirst. In the immortal words of that great philosopher Joni Mitchell, “Got to get back to the land, set my soul free. We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Related:

Pin It: