Tramp Quotes

“...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.”

“Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance”

“Would to God we were all Christians who profess to be Christians, and that we lived up to what we profess. Then would the Christian shine forth “clear as the sun, fair as the moon,” and what besides—why, “amazing as an army withbanners”! A consistent Church is an amazing Church—an honest, upright Church would shake the world! The tramp ofgodly men is the tramp of heroes; these are the thundering legions that sweep everything before them. The men that arewhat they profess to be, hate the semblance of a lie—whatever shape it wears—and would sooner die than do that which is dishonest, or that which would be degrading to the glory of a Heaven-born race, and to the honor of Him by whose name they have been called! O Christians! You will be the world’s contempt; you will be their despising, and hissing unless you live for one objective!”

“A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.”

“Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes from tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings.”

“If travel were so inspiring and informing a business...then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.”

“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

“I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”