Hiking and outdoor quotes

Quotes

Over the years we have published a selection of hiking and other outdoor based quotes as part of our regular newsletters. These quotes cover the full range from witty, to inspiring, and sometimes irreverent, so we thought we would collect them all in one central location and continue to update this list on a regular basis as we find more quotes.

The following list is arranged in alphabetical order based on the attributed author’s last name. Enjoy!

Anonymous

Anywhere is ‘within walking distance’.

Anonymous

Comfortable in camp, or comfortable on the trail.

Anonymous

Go where you feel most alive.

Anonymous

Hiking is the answer.  Who cares what the question is.

Anonymous

Hiking side effects include sweating, euphoria and general awesomeness.

Anonymous

I hike to burn off the crazy.

Anonymous

It feels good to be lost in the right direction.

Anonymous

If the winter is too cold and the summer is too hot, you are not a hiker.

Anonymous

Let’s wander where the WiFi is weak

Anonymous

The earth has music for those who listen.

Anonymous

I don’t get it. The trail looked so flat on the map.

Anonymous

Bring a compass.  It’s awkward when you have to eat your friends.

Anonymous

The closer you are to nature, the further you are from idiots.

Anonymous

I will go hiking here or there, I will go hiking everywhere.

Anonymous

When everything feels like an uphill struggle, Just think of the view from the top.

 Anonymous

A

Adventure is the result of poor planning.

Roald Amundsen, Polar Explorer

 

Nature is one of the most underutilised treasures in life. It has the power to unburden hearts and reconnect to that inner place of peace.

Janice Anderson

B

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.

John Burroughs

If happiness is the goal – and it should be, then adventures should be top priority.

Richard Branson

What a lovely surprise to discover how un-lonely being alone can be.

Ellen Burstyn

C

May you live in interesting times.

Confucius

D

To walk in nature is to witness a thousand miracles.

Mary Davis

Never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost, and you see a path. By all means, you should follow that.

Ellen DeGeneres

You shall have a place outside the camp, and you shall go out to it. And you shall have a stick with your weapons, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement.

Deuteronomy 23:12-13

When you go out there you don’t get away from it all, you get back to it all. You come home to what’s important. You come home to yourself.

Peter Dombrovskis

I love walking because it clears your mind, enriches the soul, takes away stress, and opens up your eyes to a whole new world.

Claudette Dudley

E

Adventure is out there.

Ellie from the movie Up

F

There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

Sir Rannulph Fiennes

He who dies with the most toys wins.

Malcolm Forbes

The best way out is always through. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. Robert Fros

Robert Frost

G

Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

Seth Godin

H

Remember to look up to the stars, not down to your feet.

Stephen Hawking

 

Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.

Frank Herbert

If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail.

Heraclitus

If you are in a bad mood go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood go for another walk.

Hippocrates

Walking is man’s best medicine. 

Hippocrates

Most folks in today’s society do not seek out things that will test them. Most seek out things that will entertain them.

David Horton

Hiking is the only slightly less ugly stepsister of running.

Lindy Hughes

I

On a hike, the days pass with the wind, the sun, the stars; movement is powered by a belly full of food and water, not a noxious tankful of fossil fuels. On a hike, you’re less a job title and more a human being. A periodic hike not only stretches the limbs but also reminds us: Wow, there’s a big old world out there.

Ken Ilgunas

J

There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.

Thomas Jefferson.

K

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing the lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.

Jack Kerouac

There was nowhere to go but everywhere.

Jack Kerouac

You haven’t lived until you’ve lived with only what you can carry under your own power

J Kline

Never underestimate the power of the Ocean

Heidi Klum

The core of mans’ spirit comes from new experiences.

Jon Krakauer

L

Walking: the most ancient exercise and still the best modern exercise.

Carrie Latet

Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization’.

Charles Lindbergh

The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A shoe is not only a design, but it’s a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you’re going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.

Christian Louboutin

Hiking is the best workout! You can hike for three hours and not even realise you’re working out. And, hiking alone lets me have some time to myself.

Jamie Luner

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more that what we could learn from books.

John Lubbock

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

John Lubbock

All those who love Nature she loves in return, and will richly reward, not perhaps with the good things, as they are commonly called, but with the best things of this world-not with money and titles, horses and carriages, but with bright and happy thoughts, contentment and peace of mind.

John Lubbock

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

Pico Lyer

M

Hiking is just walking where it’s okay to pee.

Demetri Martin

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. 

Terence McKenna

In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.

John Muir

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

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

John Muir

Between every two pines there is a doorway to a new world.

John Muir

N

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If adventure has a final and all-embracing motive, it is surely this: we go out because it is our nature to go out, to climb mountains, and to paddle rivers, to fly to the planets and plunge into the depths of the oceans… When man ceases to do these things, he is no longer man.

Wilfrid Noyce

Ever since a small boy, I have loved just to look at the mountains, to see them in different lights and from different angles, to feel their rough rock under my fingers and the breath of the winds against my feet… I am in love with the mountains.

Wilfrid Noyce

O

Hiking is just walking where the ground doesn’t cooperate

Outdoor Man TV series

Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.

Erol Ozan

P

The only trips I regret are the ones I didn’t do.

Paddy Pallin

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.

Sylvia Plath

Fall down seven times and stand up eight.

Japanese Proverb

Camping is not a date; it’s an endurance test. If you can survive camping with someone, you should marry them on the way home.

Yvonne Prinz

Leave the road, take the trails.

Pythagoras

Q

He who spends time regretting the past loses the present and risks the future.

Francisco de Quevedo

R

Walking for health and fitness, the easiest way to get in shape and stay in shape.

Frank Ring

Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.

Andy Rooney

Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking. You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.

Cindy Ross

S

That’s my rock, you need to find your own!

Gill Savage

Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.

Dr Seuss

You’re off to great place, today is your day. Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way.

Dr Seuss

Carry as little as possible, but choose that little with care.

Earl Shaffer

May your time in nature lead you to yourself.

Shikoba

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.

Beverly Sills

There is no Wifi in the Forest, but I promise you will find a better connection.

Ralph Smart

Walking is how the body measures itself against the earth.

Rebecca Solnit

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gary Snyder

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

Gary Snyder

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance between spirit and humility.

Gary Snyder

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

John Steinbeck

We live in a fast-paced society. Walking slows us down.

Robert Sweetgall

Devote six years to your work, but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers. So that your friends, by remembering what you were, do not prevent you from being what you have become.

Leo Szilard

T

You never climb the same mountain twice, not even in memory. Memory rebuilds the mountain, changes the weather, retells the jokes, remakes all the moves.

Lito Tejada-Flores

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.

Henry David Thoreau

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.

Henry David Thoreau

I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than trees.

Henry David Thoreau

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Henry David Thoreau

Not all who wander are lost.

J.R.R Tolkien

You can never turn your back on the ocean.

Rip Torn

After a day’s walk, everything has twice its usual value.

G.M. Trevelyan

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.

Mark Twain

The better organised you are in the simple things, the more spontaneous and free you can be in the more important things.

Brian Tracy

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Lao Tzu

U

V

W

Oh, how can I put into words the joys of a walk over country such as this; the scenes that delight the eyes, the blessed peace of mind, the sheer exuberance which fills your soul as you tread the firm turf? This is something to be lived, not read about.

Alfred Wainwright

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.

Izaak Walton

 

Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Walt Whitman

I put tape on the mirrors in my house so I don’t accidentally walk through into another dimension.

Steven Wright

X

Y

I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth.  Then I ask myself the same question.

Harun Yahya

Hiking’s not for everyone. Notice the wilderness is mostly empty.

Sonja Yoerg

Z

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