Best Hiker Quotes

You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, So… get on your way!

Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.

The place where you lose the trail is not necessarily the place where it ends.

I like being near the top of a mountain. One can’t get lost here.

Rumors said that if he got drunk enough, he sometimes got his jollies by stripping naked and scaring hikers out in the Broken into thinking he was Bigfoot.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

A hiker who was lost in a blizzard said he stayed alive by digging a snow tunnel and burning dollar bills for warmth. Today he was offered a job as President Obama’s economic adviser.

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.

Always avoid picking up hitch-hikers who are wearing a mask.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow pizza.

Somewhere between the bottom of the climb and the summit is the answer to the mystery why we climb.

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.

Getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

I picked up a hitch hiker. You’ve got to when you hit them.

After a day’s walk everything has twice its usual value.

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, the effect of which is like having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide has not been an opera. It has however been a tapestry, if you count a woven bath towel as a tapestry.

Take only memories, leave only footprints.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.

If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.