Rebecca Solnit Quotes

Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe.

An hour's hard digging is a good way of getting one's mind back in the right perspective.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

I do find walking is fundamental to my creative process.

Walking is magic. Can't recommend it highly enough. I read that Plato and Aristotle did much of their brilliant thinking together while ambulating. The movement, the meditation, the health of the blood pumping, and the rhythm of footsteps... this is a primal way to connect with one's deeper self.

Try and get out into nature for even 30 min. each day to clear your head + think + walk + breathe. Great daily practice.

A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

It is on these (20min) walks that my best ideas come to me. It is while walking that difficult clarity emerges. It is while walking that I experience a sense of well-being and connection, and it is in walking that I live most prayerfully.

Walking is also an ambulation of mind.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

I'd always liked jogging because it was a place to think.

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life - a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it's like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness.

We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock.

Never trust a thought that didn't come by walking.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

...if we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence.

Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance beween spirit and humility.

The pause is a part of the walk.

I think people can find a breath and listen sometimes.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence.

The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.

He that contemplates hath a day without night.

In my walks I would fain return to my senses.