There are no new themes for a writer, only new ways of setting down old themes, new eyes to wander among old rocks.

I’m likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.

...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.

I am as restless a traveller in my own land as a wintering whooper swan.

But I would point out that there is another and still more important function of great mountains - the culture not of athletic faculty alone, but of that intellectual sympathy with untamed and primitive Nature which our civilization threatens to destroy. A mountain is something more than a thing to climb. To the many who, on a fine summer day, swarm up Skiddaw or Snowdon by the well-worn pony-paths, it is pure holiday-making; to the few who (in another sense) swarm up Scafell Pinnacel or the Napes needle, it is pure gymnastics; but between or beyond these two classes there are those - pilgrims I call them - who find mountain climbing what only mountains can give, the contact with unsophisticated Nature, the opportunity to be alone, to be out of and above the world of ordinary life, to pass from the familiar sights and surroundings into a cloudland of new shapes and sounds, where one feels the fascination of that undiscoverable secret (I do not know how else to name it) by which every true nature-lover is allured.

Kaç sene oldu altın başakların arasında koşup, yemyeşil çimenlerde yuvarlanmayalı? Kaç sene oldu pamuk bulutlara basıp, masmavi gökyüzü ile yıkanmayalı? Büyüdün diye mi uzaktan bakıp iç geçirmekle yetiniyorsun sadece? Yoksa ayıp olur mu diye çekiniyorsun bu yaştan sonra çayıra, çimene? Buna büyümek değil, yaşlanmak deniyor dostum. Koş, yat, yuvarlan... Üstün başın kirlensin, çimen kok, toprak dolsun ayakkabılarına... Hatta bir iki tane de diken batsın koluna, bacağına. Canın acısın. Bir canın olduğunu anla... Toprağın altına girmeden önce, üstüyle hesabın kalmasın...