“Falling out of a posture means you are human; getting back into the posture means you are a yogi.”

Therefore, I think that in the celebration of the 50 years of the present reign, there must be research on the changes that the country has undergone, and in the future, it could be used as a lesson for our future actions.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.

The writer’s life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody’s fault. You chose it.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

A tiny bundle of genetic material passed from one living entity to another, and has never stopped moving since. It was the moment of creation for us all.

Absolute brain size does not tell you everything or possibly sometimes even much. Elephants and whales both have brains larger than ours, but you wouldn’t have much trouble outwitting them in contract negotiations.

Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.

Every kid I knew had a father with a little stash of men’s magazines which the father thought was secret and which the kid knew all about.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows…

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.

All the truths of mathematics are linked to each other.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

When I see myself on film it makes me smile.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues.

There must be a law if there is to be liberty. Try to play a piano and you will run into laws as fixed as the decrees of the Medes and Persians.

Every work has the bad side, and people will be mean to you, and when you’re young, you don’t know how to defend yourself.

I’m constantly scared. I’m constantly fearful of what’s to come and people don’t realize that.

To me, my favorite comic book movies were the ones that were never based on comic books, like Unforgiven.