“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception.”

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

The remarkable position in which we find ourselves is that we don’t actually know what we actually know.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

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,

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.

Where I grew up, in Des Moines, Iowa, there is hardly any downtown economic activity now. Everybody shops in malls – you don’t find a sense of community in malls.

This was 1990, the year that communism died in Europe and it seemed strange to me that in all the words that were written about the fall of the iron curtain, nobody anywhere lamented that it was the end of a noble experiment.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment.

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

…and it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought experienced in 360 degrees, that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

Path presupposes distance; If He be near, no path needest thou at all. Verily it maketh me smile To hear of a fish in water athirst!

As long as I talked unceasingly about the Lord,The Lord stayed away, kept at a distance.But when I silenced my mouth, sat very stillAnd fixed my mind at the doorway of the Lord,I was linked to the music of the Word,And all my talking came to an end.

Present joys are more to flesh and blood Than a dull prospect of a distant good.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn’t see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.

The way to heaven out of all places is of length and distance.

The distance between us is long but my love covers all grounds.

Observe that the body of man is confined to a small place; it covers only two spans of earth. But the spirit and mind of man travel to all countries and regions

The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.