Words worth keeping

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing your placein the family of things.

I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.