There are clothes which rob you of your liberty, and other clothes which give it you again
Class is the most disgusting institution of civilisation, because it puts barriers between man and man.
—Chapter 2, Motley
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Tramping is first of all a rebellion against housekeeping and daily and monthly accounts. You may escape from the spending mania, but first of all you escape from the inhibition, that is the word, the inhibition of needing to earn a living. In tramping you are not earning a living, but earning a happiness.
—Chapter 5, Carrying Money
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But there is perhaps no greater test of friendship than going on a long tramp. You discover to one another all the egoisms and selfishnesses you possess. You may not see your own: you see your companion’s faults. In truth, if you want to find out about a man, go for a long tramp with him.
The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed. There are those who complain, making each mile seem like three; there are those who have untapped reserves of cheerfulness, who sing their companions through the tired hours. But in drawing-rooms, trains, tennis-parties, theatre and dance-hall, they would never show either quality. The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience, energy, vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things.
—Chapter 6, The Companion
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The principal motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a sub-conscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on something very wonderful—beyond the horizon's rim.
I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick-fire by the roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil.
Life teaches the wanderer that peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times be irresistible.
There is one crude unmannerly truth that the traveller always comes upon in the course of his experience of new places, and that is, that imagination, though very charming, is nearly always wrong. Knowledge of living detail shows the world to be full of the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unimagined.
It is always worth while to quit for a time the rabbit hutches of civilisation and do something which stay-at-home folk call flying in the face of fortune. “Is it not comfortable enough where you are?” they ask.
People go with heaps of luggage and find themselves tied to it, returning inevitably to it even from delightful daily expeditions, like cows from pasture.
A fortnight or three weeks spent going continuously with sunset and dawn joined by your resting-place in the hills has a larger content than the equivalent days spent going out to a certain point and then returning to an hotel.
No number of museums or handbooks or columns of statistics can give you the sum of reality obtained, quite simply and without particular effort, upon the road.
—Chapter 7, Whither Away?
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The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental.
I listen with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the happy morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist.
Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments, not in distance run.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be picked, nests to be looked into, song-birds to hear, falcons to be watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry.
There should be no “got to be” anywhere at any time, no hotel that you are making for twenty miles the other side of the range; no rendezvous with a young cousin or an old man at the cross-roads at sundown, but a blessed insouciance regarding men and things.
The grand desideratum is to have found an agreeable spot. “We can put in forty minutes here!”—“My friend, hours!”
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion; only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens your mind. Town makes men contentious; the country smoothes out their souls.
—Chapter 8, The Art of Idleness
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The absolute tramp, whom, I may say, I have never met, is a man with no address, no card, no reliable passport, no recognisable finger-prints. But of course he is no ape-man, no Tarzan, or son of Tarzan. Choice, not accident, leads him to the wilds.
...of all these emblems, the coffeepot is apt to be the most real and vital. You will be on your knees morning and evening before your altar fire, abasing your brow and blowing the flames which are beneath it Sun, moon, forest, river, road—these pass, but the coffee-pot remains. It is so in life generally, and the tramp, however much a poet he may be, is a mortal like the rest of us The moon may be hidden by a cloud, but that is not nearly so calamitous as having left the coffee-pot at the last camping-place.
—Chapter 9, Emblems of Tramping
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The tramping life is not in caves and huts and holes and inns, but in the open. The life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him. It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man big, it builds a man within.
—Chapter 17, The Open
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“Coffee should be made with love; that’s the first ingredient,” and “the chief cause of coffee being just indifferent is your indifference towards the coffee"
—Chapter 18, The Tramp as Cook
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You stop when you like, you go on when you like. You surely come to places in which you are tempted to remain—be it only for a few days. You stay a day, and the place grows on you; you stay longer. And then, when the spirit moves, you move with it, move on, enriched by your delay, by your idleness.
So also man’s life. We think of it in length of years. But that in a way is error. Life is not length of time, but breadth of human experience. Life is not a chain of events, but an area—something spreading out from a hidden centre and welling at once towards all points of the compass.
—Chapter 21, Long Halts
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You have the great advantage of facing society from the outside of its classes. You are at the bottom of the social system and have the freedom from pride which such a position implies.
—Chapter 22, Foreigners
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After we die we may be set to write an essay on our life-story. It will be “impressions de voyage.” Fifty years in an office will be found shrivelled up to a dot, and a few days in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.
A thought recorded, one that is your own, written down the day when it occurred, is a mental snap-shot, and is at least as valuable as the photographs you may take on your journey. Yesterday’s thought is worth considering again, if only as the stepping-stone of your dead self.
—Chapter 23, The Artist's Notebook
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The adventure is the not getting there, it’s the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfilment of prophecy, but the providence of something better than that prophesied. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving the world an even chance to see you.
—Chapter 26, A Zigzag Walk
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