Frédéric Gros

“Asks why so many of our writers and philosophers have also been indefatigable walkers.” – Financial Times ”It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.” - Nietzsche By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B — the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble — and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.

A Philosophy of Walking

Maria Buitrago

But haste and speed accclerate 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. 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. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this; then that; and then something else. 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.

Marion

When you are that age, when you can't say that you have loved, because love is still a future flowering that you yearn for with your entire being, there is lightness in your step, eagerness for the great love at the end of the road.

Will Dawson

The lesson was that in walking, the authentic sign of assurance is a good slowness. What I mean is a sort of slowness that isn't exactly the opposite of speed.

A Philosophy of Walking quotes

Join the club