# A Philosophy of Walking - Author: [Frederic Gros](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros.md) - Quotes: 15 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking ## Quotes > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/you-are-nobody.md) > But walking causes absorption. Walking interminably, taking in through your pores the height of the mountains when you are confronting them at length, breathing in the shape of the hills for hours at a time during a slow descent. The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. And thus, gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape. That doesn’t have to mean dissolution, as if the walker were fading away to become a mere inflection, a footnote. It’s more a flashing moment: sudden flame, time catching fire. And here, the feeling of eternity is all at once that vibration between presences. Eternity, here, in a spark. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/but-walking-causes.md) > Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/perhaps-the-itinerant.md) > First of all, there is the suspensive freedom that comes by walking, even a simple short stroll: throwing of the burden of cares, forgetting business for a time. You choose to leave the once behind, go out, stroll around, think about other things. With a longer excursion of several days, the process of self-liberation is accentuated: you escape the constraints of work, throw of the yoke of routine. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/first-of-all.md) > During long cross-country wanders, you do glimpse that freedom of pure renunciation. When you walk for a long time, there comes a moment when you no longer know how many hours have passed, or how many more will be needed to get there; you feel on your shoulders the weight of the bare necessities, you tell yourself that’s quite enough – that really nothing more is needed to keep body and soul together – and you feel you could carry on like this for days, for centuries. You can hardly remember where you are going or why; that is as meaningless as your history, or what the time is. And you feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems absolutely derisory, minuscule, insubstantial. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/during-long-cross-country.md) > But above all, silence is the dissipation of our language. ... In the silence of a walk, when you end up losing the use of words because by then you are doing nothing but walk, ... in that silence you hear better, because you are finally hearing what has no vocation to be retranslated, recoded, reformatted. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/but-above-all.md) > Lastly, you are not alone because when you walk you soon become two. Especially after walking for a long time. What I mean is that even when I am alone, there is always this dialogue between the body and the soul. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/lastly-you-are.md) > There’s the silence of early morning. For long routes in autumn you have to start very early. Outside everything is violet, the dim light slanting through red and gold leaves. It is an expectant silence. You walk softly among huge dark trees, still swathed in traces of blue night. You are almost afraid of awakening. Everything whispering quietly. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/theres-the-silence-of.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/so-its-best.md) > There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/theres-the-silence.md) > The first eternity we encounter is that of rocks, of the swooping contour of the plains, of the skylines: all that is resistant, unchanging. ... You are facing a mountain, walking among great trees, and you think: they are just there. They are there, they didn’t expect me, they were always there. They were there long before me and they will still be there long after me. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/the-first-eternity.md) > You’re doing nothing when you walk, nothing but walking. But having nothing to do but walk makes it possible to recover the pure sensation of being, to rediscover the simple joy of existing, the joy that permeates the whole of childhood. So that walking, by unburdening us, prising us from the obsession with doing, puts us in touch with that childhood eternity once again. I mean that walking is so to speak child’s play. To marvel at the beauty of the day, the brightness of the sun, the grandeur of the trees, the blue of the sky: to do that takes no experience, no ability. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/youre-doing-nothing.md) > There’s the silence of walks through the snow, muffled footsteps under a white sky. All around you nothing moves. Things and even time itself are iced up, frozen solid in silent immobility. Everything is stopped, unified, thickly padded. A watching silence, white, fluffy, suspended as if in parentheses. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/theres-the-silence-of-walks.md) > Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun. Blinding, mineral, shattering silence. You hear nothing but the quiet crunch of stones underfoot. An implacable, definitive silence, like a transparent death. Sky of a perfectly detached blue. You advance with eyes down, reassuring yourself sometimes with a silent mumbling. Cloudless sky, limestone slabs filled with presence: silence nothing can sidestep. Silence fulfilled, vibrant immobility, tensed like a bow. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/then-theres-the.md) > Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional. If you want to go faster, then don’t walk, do something else: drive, slide or fly. Don’t walk. And when you are walking, there is only one sort of performance that counts: the brilliance of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport. > > Once on his feet, though, man does not stay where he is. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/frederic-gros/a-philosophy-of-walking/walking-is-the.md)