Quotes from Frédéric Gros

Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints…

Anger is needed to leave, to walk. That doesn't come from outside. In the hollow of the belly the pain of being here, the impossibility of remaining where you are, of being buried alive, of simply staying.

Slowness means cleaving perfectly to time, so closely that the seconds fall one by one, drop by drop like the steady dripping of a tap on stone. This stretching of time deepens space. It is one of the secrets of walking: a slow approach to landscapes that gradually renders them familiar. Like the regular encounters that deepen friendship.

Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.

silence usually taught him more than the company of others.

When there is really nothing left to do or believe, except to remember, walking helps retrieve the absolute simplicity of presence, beyond all hope, before any expectation.

You are out of the world's chatter, its corridor echoes, its muttering. Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds.

The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It's an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal. But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour.

When you are on foot, to arrive you must walk.

Being in company forces one to jostle, hamper, walk at the wrong speed for others. When walking it's essential to find your own basic rhythm, and maintain it. The right basic rhythm is the one that suits you, so well that you don't tire and can keep it up for ten hours. But it is highly specific and exact. So that when you are forced to adjust to someone else's pace, to walk faster or slower than usual, the body follows badly.

Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate repetition of the possible.

In walking, far from any vehicle or machine, from any mediation, I am replaying the earthly human condition, embodying once again man's inborn, essential destitution. That is why humility is not humiliating: it just makes vain pretensions fall away, and thus nudges us towards authenticity.

You lift your head, you're on your way, but really just to be walking, to be out of doors. That's it, that's all, and you're there. Outdoors is our element: the exact sensation of living there.

Andar no es un deporte. Poner un pie delante de otro es un juego de niños. Cuando dos caminantes se encuentran, no es cuestión ni de resultados ni de números: uno le dirá al otro qué camino ha tomado, qué sendero ofrece el paisaje más hermoso, qué panorama se contempla desde tal o cual promontorio.

When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.

Just as there are several solitudes, so there are several silences.

Thus the man who walks all day has become certain by nightfall.

You don't walk to kill time but to welcome it, to pick off its leaves and petals one by one, second by second.

Camminando, ci si ricorda soltanto dei propri sogni.

Disiplin imkanl? olan?n ?srarla tekrarlanmas?yla fethedilen imkans?zl?kt?r.

Toprak ebedi bir güç mmembas?yd?, çünkü o gerçek Anam?zd?, bizi besler ve ayr?ca ba?r?nda atalar?m?z? saklard?. Tabiatta dönü?üm onda gerçekle?irdi.

Andar no es un deporte. El deporte es una cuestión de técnicas y de reglas, de resultados y de competición, y todo ello requiere un largo aprendizaje: conocer las posiciones, dominar los gestos adecuados. Y, mucho después, vienen la improvisación y el talento.

Caminando, solo una hazaña importa: la intensidad del cielo, la belleza de los paisajes. Andar no es un deporte.

He wasn't walking to find his own identity, or to rediscover a disguised singularity, or to get a rest from shuffling masks; but walking long distances to find in himself the man from another age, the first man. Walking, but not as one might go to the desert to escape the world and its horrors, purified by solitude, prepared for one's celestial destiny. But walking to find in himself the man fresh from the hands of Nature, the absolute primitive.