2013 Faith in Wellness Challenge Week 13: Take a Walk

Decidedly easier when a dog is involved, taking daily walks serve up multiple benefits.

  • A walk can be a form or exercise.
  • A walk can be an excuse for a good conversation.
  • A walk can be a way to connect more deeply with nature.
  • A walk can be a welcome break from a complex project.
  • A walk can be a meditation.
  • A walk can be a reset, rehab or release from a busy, hectic, emotional day.
  • A walk can be long, short or in-between.
  • A walk can be power, leisurely, fast or slow.
  • A walk can get you from point a to point b or have no particular destination in mind.
  • A walk can stoke your creative imagination or help you find analytical solutions to big problems.
  • A walk can be all of these things, some of these things or none of these things at all.

Best of all, walking is free.

No matter what walking is to you, it is clear that the act of walking holds some magic in it. Here are 26 quotes about walking from our greatest philosophers, authors, thinkers, comedians and human beings:

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.”
~Ellen DeGeneres

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn–that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness–that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
~Jane Austen

“But the beauty is in the walking — we are betrayed by destinations.”
~Gwyn Thomas

“Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
~Rebecca Solnit

“If you seek creative ideas go walking.
Angels whisper to a man when he goes for
a walk.”
~Raymond I. Myers

“Now shall I walk or shall I ride?
‘Ride,’ Pleasure said;
‘Walk,’ Joy replied.”
~William Henry Davies

“Walking in the morning takes you to beautiful places where light and shade make love.”
~Prof. Mohamed Shareef

“I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live within walking distance of either beauty or convenience, if not both.”
~Victoria Moran

“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,

“Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
~Henry David Thoreau

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk.  Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness.  I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.”
~Soren Kierkegaard

“You need special shoes for hiking — and a bit of a special soul as well.”
~Terri Guillemets

“He who limps is still walking.”
~Stanislaw J. Lec

“After dinner sit awhile, after supper walk a mile.”
~English Proverb

“Walking takes longer…than any other known form of locomotion except crawling.  Thus it stretches time and prolongs life.  Life is already too short to waste on speed.”
~Edward Abbey

“Hiking is just walking where it’s okay to pee.”
~Demetri Martin

“Don’t let people drive you crazy when you know it’s in walking distance.”
~Author Unknown

“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
~Audrey Hepburn

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
~Albert Camus

“As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.”
~Ben Hogan

“No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.”
~Buddha

“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“A friend is one who walks in when others walk out.”
~Walter Winchell

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
~Mark Twain

“God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk.”
~Meister Eckhart

Sources: Quote Garden, GoodReads, BrainyQuote

Image credit: lindejesus