Quotes About Adventure

In short, all good things are wild and free.

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.

The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.

Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or timid.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, There goes a Sainte-Terrer, a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.

We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun

A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Many men walk by day; few walk by night. It is a different season.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from–toward; it is the history of every one of us.

There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.

Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows that surround it. We need the tonic of wildness...

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.

I have learned that the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi.

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now.

De la literatura sólo nos atrae lo salvaje. El aburrimiento no es sino otro nombre para lo domesticado.

It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.