Quotes & Sayings About Hiking

I'm not surfing much anymore, but I love hiking and gardening, and I'm always wearing a hat and sunblock. — Carolyn Murphy

In a broader context, all rounds of golf are of no consequence, whether score is kept or not. But you are the center of your own universe. You are free to create meaning for yourself. When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of "highlight." Analogies abound because a focused attitude defines the quality of all that we do. In playing a game, dieting, or hiking the AT, you benefit most when you commit yourself to it, embrace it. — David Miller

I'm a closet outdoorsy athletic enthusiast, and I would love to do a rafting and hiking trip someday and maybe sleep in a treehouse and bathe in a chilly winding river. — Rachel Platten

When I have a little down time, I like to go to the gym and try to bank some hours there. I like to spend time with my dogs, go hiking, do a little traveling. — Emmanuelle Vaugier

I had married an environmentalist and didn't know it.
I knew without having to look that there was no tree hugging indemnity clause even in the fine print of our marriage certificate. But we'd been manacled together in the Catholic Church. I wondered if I could get some leverage with the religious institution if I pinned my wife with the label of nature-worshipping Wiccan or possibly even Druid. — Michael Gurnow

How fabulous down was for those first minutes! Down, down, down I'd go until down too became impossible and punishing and so relentless that I'd pray for the trail to go back up. Going down, I realized was like taking hold of the loose strand of yarn on a sweater you'd just spent hours knitting and pulling it until the entire sweater unraveled into a pile of string. Hiking the PCT was the maddening effort of knitting that sweater and unraveling it over and over again. As if everything gained was inevitably lost. — Cheryl Strayed

The most I have to fear while hiking in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, the two historic British counties closest to my city home in Birmingham, is whether or not the mud awaiting me in the narrow lanes ahead is deep enough to foul my socks. — Jim Crace

In general, when you travel, you get into a different reality and are able to more accurately reflect on your ordinary life. Hiking does that for me. — John Mackey

I was no longer following a trail.

I was learning to follow myself. — Aspen Matis

I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map ... nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin's terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home. — Rebecca Solnit

Here's what I think," says Jasmine between chattering teeth. "If these humans are stupid enough to go hiking in this - " she gestures to the thick mist swirling around us '-then they deserve to be led into a marsh and drowned. — Rachel Morgan

Why are you telling me?" Maura asked. "Why is your face so red?"

"Because you're my mother. Because you're an authority figure. Because you're supposed to inform people of your travel plans when you're hiking on dangerous trails. This is what my face always looks like. — Maggie Stiefvater

Make your feet your friend. — James M. Barrie

[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings. — Paul Krugman

Most of Ludwig's excesses involved pursuits popular among Bavarians, who shared his love for hiking, drinking, and over the top decorating — Susan Barnett Braun

As writers, we must keep throwing problems at our characters. Conflict is the heart of good storytelling. Hiking in nature along a twisting trail can remind us what a good story feels like. It's the opposite of a treadmill - or an interstate highway. — Kate Klise

I usually find myself hiking in a place that not a lot of people go hiking, just trying to find some solitude. I like being out in the middle of nowhere. Not always, but it's a good place to go to just reflect and think, and it's something I really enjoy. — Rami Malek

After more than two thousand miles on the [Appalachian] trail, you can expect to undergo some personality changes. A heightened affinity for nature infiltrates your life. Greater inner peace. Enhanced self-esteem. A quiet confidence that if I could do that, I can do and should do whatever I really want to do. More appreciation for what you have and less desire to acquire what you don't. A childlike zest for living life to the fullest. A refusal to be embarrassed about having fun. A renewed faith in the essential goodness of humankind. And a determination to repay others for the many kindnesses you have received. — Larry Luxenberg

After a day's walk everything has twice its usual value. — G. M. Trevelyan

I want a guy I can go hiking with, who wants to do outdoorsy stuff. It's so much fun to be out in nature and who better to do that with than the person you're dating? — Adrianne Palicki

I love walks, hiking, exploring and being on the beach. — Ireland Baldwin

Then eventually Westwood arrived. He looked nothing like Reacher expected, but the reality fit the bill just as well as the preconceptions had. He was an outdoors type, not a lab rat, and sturdy rather than pencil-necked. He looked like a naturalist or an explorer. He had short but unruly hair, fair going gray, and a beard of the same length and color. He was red in the face from sunburn and had squint lines around his eyes. He was forty-five, maybe. He was wearing clothing put together from high-tech fabrics and many zippers, but it was all old and creased. He had hiking boots on his feet, with speckled laces like miniature mountain-climbing ropes. He was toting a canvas bag about as big as a mail carrier's. — Lee Child

I've been doing a lot of hiking, which I love. — Calista Flockhart

Hiking is great because it's a lifelong sport and you're outdoors, active, so whether you call that a sport or a hobby or a recreation, I think the wording - it's a great way to get exercise, and it can be as challenging as you want to make it. — Jennifer Pharr Davis

But the truth is, I want to be some woman's work boots, not her high heels."
"Work boots?" What was sexy about that? And did women have work boots?
"Yeah. You know, the boots she pulls out when she wants to get down and dirty, hiking or gardening or boating or painting the kitchen. The ones she relies on and trusts and lives her life hard and good and on her terms in. Her favorites. — Erin McCarthy

Always take the scenic route. — Janice Anderson

Now that I have a 16-month-old son, my weekend ritual has changed - but it's better than ever. We get up early and go for a walk on one of the hiking trails near my home in Los Angeles, then meet up with friends at a diner. There's nothing better than sipping coffee, eating scrambled eggs, and taking three hours to do it. — Connie Britton

Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird. — Jules Renard

I was placeless. I carried everything on my back, exactly what I needed to survive. I didn't know how I'd survive without this structure, silent bears and vista highs, the infinite beauty. — Aspen Matis

I love to play. I love, opera, hiking and museums. The one thing I don't do is sit. I have a tremendous amount of energy. — Alan Dershowitz

Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably - this name that I'd been given at birth that defined me before I'd had the chance to define myself. — Aspen Matis

Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless.

But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it. — Aspen Matis

When I felt strongly I would say it strongly. — Aspen Matis

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction. — Aspen Matis

For some reason, some of my best solutions and ideas are triggered in those dark theaters, usually totally unrelated to what's going on onscreen. I also enjoy hiking in the foothills and mountains close to Sacramento. I always have to bring a pen and paper to jot down sudden thoughts and ideas. So inspiration arises from countless sources. — James Rollins

I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me.

Moving forward, I wanted rules. — Aspen Matis

The thing about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, the thing that was so profound to me that summer - and yet also, like most things, so very simple - was how few choices I had and how often I had to do the thing I least wanted to do. How there was no escape or denial. No numbing it down with a martini or covering it up with a roll in the hay. As I clung to the chaparral that day, attempting to patch up my bleeding finger, terrified by every sound that the bull was coming back, I considered my options. There were only two and they were essentially the same. I could go back in the direction I had come from, or I could go forward in the direction I intended to go. — Cheryl Strayed

I'm mostly pretty quiet on the weekends. I either read or visit friends or go hiking or something like that. — Troian Bellisario

Half the charm of climbing mountains is born in visions preceding this experience - visions of what is mysterious, remote, inaccessible. — George Leigh Mallory

I represent what is left of a vanishing race, and that is the pedestrian. That I am still able to be here, I owe to a keen eye and a nimble pair of legs. But I know they'll get me someday. — Will Rogers

What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. — Bill Bryson

Maybe I'm making this up, but my portions seem to be smaller lately. I'm not sure why. The hiking and running on the tracker keep me fit. If anything, I should be getting more food, not less. It must be my imagination. — Ally Condie

Some of the men were dressed like Peter and wore red plaid hunting jackets or bulky tan Carhartt jackets or lined flannel shirts, and all of those men were wearing jeans and work boots. Some of the men wore ski jackets and hiking boots and the sort of many-pocketed army green pants that made you want to get out of your seat and rappel. Some of the men wore wide-wale corduroy pants and duck boots and cable0knit sweaters and scarves. It was a regular United Nations of white American manhood. But all the men, no matter what they were wearing, were slouching in their chairs, with their legs so wide open that it seemed as though there must be something severely wrong with their testicles. — Brock Clarke

Grammar to a writer is to a mountaineer a good pair of hiking boots or, more precisely, to a deep-sea diver an oxygen tank. — A.A. Patawaran

All over America highschool and college kids thinking 'Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking' while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded — Jack Kerouac

My hobbies are mountain biking, horseback riding and packing, canoeing and kayaking, hiking, camping, cooking, and skiing. — Douglas Preston

If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers. — Michael Gurnow

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience. — Kate Klise

I go through phases as far as working out goes. I'll do yoga for a few months or then work out at the gym, and then if I'm not doing either, there are things that I usually try and do something active, whether it's trying to jump in the ocean with the surfboard or go hiking. — Sarah Roemer

I don't like hiking with convicts carrying machetes. — Susan Orlean

The mountains were there and so was I. — Maurice Herzog

When my father was posted to Malaysia, we'd take bacon-and-egg sandwiches in our backpacks and go hiking in the jungle or make bamboo rafts to sail down rivers. — Rory Stewart

There are approximately nine trillion cells in my body and every single one of them hates hiking. And walking. Just moving for extended periods of time in general, really. All nine trillion of us would rather be in bed. — Sara Wolf

I did a lot of hiking and I loved it. — Ashley Judd

I try and find fun activities like mountain biking, hiking, or water sports for a workout rather than pushing weight in the gym. — Nate Holland

Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country's Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be. — Aspen Matis

Many climbers become writers because of the misconceptions about climbing. — Jonathan Waterman

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn't respond in my head, but I knew he'd gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, "Don't tread on you?"
"More like 'don't metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,' but it's the same sentiment, really."
"Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn."
"Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?"
He sighed, but I didn't need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn't clear, he verbalized it. "You have always, always been a difficult child."
I smiled sweetly. "I try. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in. — David Rakoff

Aside from marrying my husband and having my children, hiking the PCT was the best thing I ever did. The hike very literally forced me to put one foot in front of the other at a time when emotionally I didn't think I could do that. — Cheryl Strayed

'Ghost Canoe' takes place on the storm-tossed tip of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, where I spent a lot of time hiking and exploring. — Will Hobbs

I'm really an outdoorsy girl. People think I can't go anywhere without getting all primped up, but I love to go camping, and I'm totally fine with not doing my hair or makeup, not taking a shower and just hiking. — Vanessa Hudgens

My most memorable hikes can be classified as 'Shortcuts that Backfired'. — Edward Abbey

America's fine, nice, nice hiking near L.A. But I am European. I love London and Paris. Friends and intellect, big thought, why not? — Olga Kurylenko

I came to Ireland 20 years ago as a student, hitch-hiking round for a week and staying in Dublin. — Greta Scacchi

How could I explain the sort of twisted fantasies I'd had to play out to Frank? Most of them I didn't even understand myself. Like being drenched in maple syrup and having acorns thrown at me by a guy wearing nothing but hiking boots. — Nicole Castle

Of all the paths you take in life,
make sure a few of them are dirt. — John Muir

When I was hitch-hiking, people had to follow me, 'cause I didn't stay long. — Brownie McGhee

I'm a huge camper, and love hiking and mountain biking. — Anna Torv

The other contained a set of rugged clothes, hiking boots, and a smaller backpack with many pouches and zippers. — Henry Gene Foster

I am so lazy. I really don't have a regimen. When I was younger I used to be into cardio and taebo and step-orobics and hiking. Lately, I haven't done anything at all. I'd like to get into yoga, but I've been really bad. — Bianca Lawson

I focus on having a feminine body, a dancer's body. I do resistance and dance and cardio. I like hiking, swimming, being active. It clears your mind and it's a good way to decompress. — Ashley Greene

I'm addicted to exercise. I love going to the gym, but my absolute favorite is hiking in L.A., particularly Runyon Canyon. It's become my mental and physical salvation. — Jonathan Keltz

Midwest kids got to summer camp. There is something very special about being away from your parents for the first time, sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing. — Jami Gertz

Now shall I walk or shall I ride? 'Ride,' Pleasure said; 'Walk,' Joy replied. — W.H. Davies

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average, the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week ... That's ridiculous. — Bill Bryson

In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the woman I wanted to be, and she was whom I needed to show Dash - and myself. — Aspen Matis

We live in a capitalist system; anyone who believes they are above this system or purer than this system, even while shopping at the cute organic market across the street or taking a hiking vacation to Guatemala, is certifiable. — Katy Lederer

Speed is not a priority, just enjoy your hike - Keep smile — Barry Perdana Putra

I absolutely love any kind of outdoor activities like snowboarding, hiking, surfing, and laying out on the beach if I ever get the time ... which is not often! — Gina Holden

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child. — Aspen Matis

I regularly go hiking with my dog in L.A. — Alyssa Sutherland

One evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall - in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. — Rebecca Goldstein

I love being outdoors - hiking, biking, and swimming. — Lea Michele

Going barefoot in the forest is a very sensuous and a pleasurable experience. For some of us it is almost a mystical experience. I know that I dreamt of it long before I ever durst try it. It is also an experience that brings into question our entire relationship with nature in a way that disturbs and challenges our ideas about ourselves as civilized beings. — Richard Keith Frazine

There are no bears on the island."
"Really, are you sure because I was hiking with my Dad and I'm sure I saw one? Either that or it was a humongous man-eating badger, with fangs. It might have been frothing at the mouth."
"Man-eating, huh? No problem then. I'm a girl. — Tracy Brogan

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn't simply walking - that I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me.

Moving forward, I wanted rules.

First - when I felt unsafe I'd leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I'd been bitten - the violation. If I wasn't interested, I would reject the man blatantly. — Aspen Matis

My ideal vacation isn't about complex maneuvers. I want to arrive somewhere foreign where I don't speak the language, go hiking, then plop down in a sunny square, have drinks, read a book, and see what happens. — Rosecrans Baldwin

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. — Michael Gurnow

Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time. — Benjamin Percy

I began to lust after our conjoining life. — Aspen Matis

Tada references the accusation in Jeremiah that the people have forsaken God as Living Water by remembering a hiking trip from her younger days. Reaching a clear stream at the end of her trip, she emptied her canteen of the warm, metallic-tasting water and filled up on fresh water. — Joni Eareckson Tada

Long distance hiking is not a vacation, it's too long for that. It's not recreation, too much toil and pain involved. It is, we decide, a way of life, a very simplified Spartan way of living ... life on the move ... heavy packs, sweating brow; they make you appreciate warm sunshine, companionship, cool water. The best way to appreciate these things that are precious and important in life it is take them away. — Cindy Ross

There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes — Aspen Matis

I'm definitely an outdoorsy guy. I like hiking, outdoor workouts with body weight. But when it comes to getting it done, I can just get in the gym and pound it out. — Derek Theler

Jesus was a hiker. The wilderness was His retreat. — Toni Sorenson

Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones. — Bill Bryson

Hiking in undiscovered places is a lot of fun. — Karolina Kurkova

It's very productive scientifically; I often get some very good ideas for my research while hiking. — Reinhard Selten

Do you know how fast you are walking? ... To get a close estimate, count the number of steps you take in a minute and divide by 30 ... — Albina Fabiani